Constructing the ‘hard core’: Youth crime and risk governance in Denmark

Denmark introduced the Youth Crime Board in 2019 as a new institutional response to children and young people (ages 10‒17) in conflict with the law. The reform was adopted despite historically low levels of recorded youth crime and within a Nordic context traditionally associated with welfare-oriented youth justice. Drawing on Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ framework and a qualitative analysis of 116 political documents and 193 media texts containing statements by political actors, this article examines how youth crime was constituted as a policy problem in the period preceding the reform. The analysis shows how political discourse increasingly centred on the figure of a so-called ‘hard core’ of children and young people in conflict with the law, portrayed as persistent, dangerous, and beyond the reach of existing welfare-based interventions. At the same time, this hard core operated as a future-oriented risk category that extended the scope of intervention to children and young people represented as being at risk of becoming part of it. The article argues that the reform illustrates how risk-oriented governance can become embedded within welfare-based youth justice through political narratives organised around prevention, future risk, and public protection.