Sweden’s government has announced plans to fit children with electronic tracking bracelets, the latest expansion of a surveillance apparatus the country has been building around its youngest residents for the past year.
Social services would decide which children aged 13 and older get tagged, based on the government’s determination that they are “at risk” of recruitment by criminal gangs. Officials estimate between 50 and 100 kids would be tracked to enforce curfews.
The bracelets are part of a much wider pattern. Since October 2025, Swedish police have had the legal authority to wiretap the electronic communications of children under 15, including in cases where no specific crime is suspected.
The country is also lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 13 for serious offenses starting July 1. The Swedish state can now listen to a child’s phone calls, read their messages, and, if this proposal passes, track their physical location in real time.
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Social Services Minister Camilla Waltersson Grönvall told reporters the device would be designed to look “like a watch or bracelet, so it wouldn’t be as obvious or stigmatizing” as an ankle bracelet used for convicted criminals. The cosmetic distinction is worth pausing on.
The device performs the same function as a criminal ankle monitor. It tracks the wearer’s movements and reports them to authorities. Calling it a watch changes the aesthetics, not the surveillance.
Grönvall said there were “173 children under the age of 15 suspected of being involved in murders or murder plots.”
She also cited 52 evidentiary proceedings against children in 2025, a legal process where a court determines guilt for children below the age of criminal responsibility, though no punishment follows. Those numbers describe a real problem. Sweden’s gang violence has pulled children into serious crime at alarming rates, with gangs recruiting minors precisely because they face lighter legal consequences.
None of that changes what the bracelet proposal actually is. The government wants to attach location-tracking hardware to children who have not been convicted of anything, based on a social worker’s assessment of future risk. The child doesn’t have to have committed a crime. They have to be deemed likely to encounter one.
“When children are at risk of falling into the clutches of serious criminals, we must have more tools to protect them,” Waltersson Grönvall said. “Electronic monitoring should be usable in serious situations, in order to break a destructive pattern in time and guarantee the child’s safety.”
The framing is protection, the mechanism is surveillance, and the target population is children selected not by courts weighing evidence, but by social services making predictions.
Children’s rights organizations, Sweden’s National Council for Crime Prevention, and UNICEF have all raised concerns about what this does to children’s civil liberties, and it’s not hard to see why.
A 13-year-old wearing a government tracking device because an official thinks they might fall in with the wrong crowd is not a child being protected. It’s a child being surveilled on the basis of a guess.
The broader trajectory should concern anyone watching. In less than a year, Sweden has authorized warrantless wiretapping of children’s phones, lowered the age at which the state can imprison a child, and now proposed physically attaching tracking devices to minors who haven’t been charged with crimes.
It all gets justified as a response to gang violence. Collectively, they represent a surveillance infrastructure built specifically around children, one that treats the youngest and most vulnerable residents of a democracy as subjects to be monitored rather than citizens to be supported.
