ABSTRACT
A 13-year-old boy of non-European origin starts to dye his dark hair in a desperate effort to seek acceptance from his Swedish school and class friends, the result being that he starts to lose his own hair, without attaining the desired fairness. His actions were a shock to his parents and to the teachers, who were unaware of his feelings of peer-rejection and his desire for acceptance from the majority group. He just wanted to fit in with the other kids at school, but his actions only increased his sense of alienation and harassment from the other children. He also felt (rightly or wrongly) that he was unfairly judged and marked in tests by the teachers because he was a foreigner, in spite of his proficiency in Swedish. This resulted in the boy becoming an under-achiever in his schoolwork. The teachers suspected that he purposely degraded his test answers in an attempt not to have better results in comparison to the majority of the other Swedish children in the class.
