The purpose of this study is to examine how swedish social workers describe the three different element of care that are described in the swedish forced law concerning children and youths. I have used a discourse analysis to capture the descriptions and how they construct the elements. The study contains six investigations about teens who have a risky behaviour and requires care without their consents. One of the boys have been charged for several serious offences, the second one is believed to be a member in a criminal gang and the third one have abuse problems, while all of the girls have a socially destructive behaviour. In all of the cases either the youth or their parents don’t want to leave a consent for care. The results of this study shows that there are different ways of constructing the different elements. For example, drug use is considered to be an addiction problem in one of the investigations but not in another one. The same can be said about the element criminal activity; that the action itself does not mean that the social worker will categorise the youth as a criminal. I also found that the elements socially destructive behaviour is created through different behaviours. It seems that the total effect of several of these behaviours combined is what creates the element socially destructive behaviour
