Loopholes. Escaping Institutional Time in Residential Youth Care

When young people in Danish residential care escape their institutions without permission it is often understood as acts of ‘troubling behaviour’ among social workers. Drawing on one and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork across three residential care institutions in Denmark, this article examines what these escapes reveal about young people’s negotiations of institutional time and space. I introduce the concept of loopholes to show how they carve out temporal and spatial openings that loosen the grip of tightly structured routines and adult-controlled time. These practices of escaping thus challenge dominant
institutional temporal and spatial frameworks and demonstrate forms of temporal agency that are usually dismissed as troubled behaviour. Instead, I argue that such loopholes create momentary pockets of autonomy and make room for youth lives that feel worth living beyond institutional schedules. The analysis contributes to broader discussions of time, agency, and institutionalization by showing how everyday acts of running around, and
reconfiguring time constitute meaningful interventions in institutional governance.