Let’s talk about sex - En undersøgelse af italesættelsen af sex og intime relationer i misbrugsbehandling for unge

In public drugtreatment for young people in Denmark, problematic drug use is to a large extent seen as a symptom of other social problems. Therefore, the social situation of the young person is included in both the explanation and the solution to the problematic drug use. In this way, the focus on the young person’s social situation implies that themes such as sex and intimate relationships can play a role in the treatment sessions. However, the articulation of young drug users’ sexual practices and intimate relationships in drug treatment is largely an unexplored field of research. In this master thesis, we investigate the role of the topics sex and intimate relationships in the drug treatment for young people through 16 qualitative interviews with drug treatment providers. The purpose of the study is two-sided: In the first part, we use Eviatar Zerubavel’s theory of distinctions to investigate why the themes sex and intimate relationships are relevant in a drug treatment context according to the drug treatment providers. In the second part,
we focus on how the drug treatment providers ascribe meaning to the young people’s sexual practices and intimate relationships. In this section, we will investigate how the young people are positioned in the provider’s stories, using Bronwyn Davie's concepts of positioning, and illuminate the gendered aspects that emerge in the stories. This study finds four frames within which the providers consider it legitimate to talk about sex and intimate relationships in the context of drugtreatment: 1) Harmreduction, 2) When reasons must be found, 3) It means something for the young people, 4) The good life. Furthermore the study provides a detailed view of how young men and women are positioned differently according to gendered lines in the stories of drug treatment providers.