Blaming violent men - A challenge to the Swedish criminal law on provocation (original) (raw)
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The main aim of the Swedish Women's Peace reform in 1998 was to enhance criminal legal protection for women exposed to violence in heterosexual relationships and to promote gender equality. However, these ambitions risk being contravened in a masculinist criminal legal system. One problem concerns how the victim is constructed in criminal legal cases. The author argues that moral balancing and discourses of responsibility and guilt in Swedish cases constrain the agency possible for women and suggest that a more comprehensive policy in Sweden must be developed to include violent men, their agency, and their responsibility for the violence.
Nordic Journal of Law and Society , 2022
Since July 1st, 2020, honour is viewed as an aggravating circumstance in criminal cases in Sweden, and it is suggested that honour related violence and oppression should become a criminal offence in its own right. Interventions directed towards victims of honour crimes have been implemented, but fewer have targeted the offenders. The purpose of this article is to mirror the Swedish legal and discursive framework against the perspective of the perpetrators. While we discuss findings with relevance for practitioners, particularly in the light of recent legislative changes, our main focus is set on subjective understandings of honour crimes. In particular, questions about the perpetrators’ norms and worldviews, their perceptions of the concept of honour, and their experiences of the Swedish justice system are investigated. Using court verdicts and deep interviews, we highlight important themes under the following four headlines: (1) Collectivism, norms, and traditions, (2) Complexities of honour crimes, (3) Marginalization, social vulnerability, and stereotyping, and (4) Reflections in retrospect. This article gives insight into some of the complexities that courts will have to handle given the recent and pending changes in Swedish legislation and provides knowledge that can be implemented in social and legal work to combat honour related violence and oppression.
The requirement to speak: Victim stories in Swedish policies against honour-related violence
Women's Studies International Forum, 2014
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Conversations Across Borders: Men and Honour Violence in U.K. and Sweden
2007
The media, in particular, in U.K. and Sweden has been implicated in disseminating decontexualised discourses, which define, construct and represent the ethnic minority communities (for example, the Turkish-Kurdish, Iraqi-Kurdish or Pakistani Muslims) as 'violent' and locate the issue of honour violence as a 'cultural' problem. A corollary to this understanding is that honour related violence (HRV) is conceptualised as irreconcilable differences between cultural values of some ethnic groups and the values of Western society. Sociologists and anthropologists have departed from these approaches and highlighted the prevalence of gendered and sexualised violence in the white Swedish and British populations but which is not approached or analysed in a culturalist and essentialist manner. These debates and rebuttals have placed honour violence at the centre stage of government and non-government attempts at combating gendered violence. However, one of the central arguments of the paper is that analysis on honour violence has inadvertently focused on men as 'perpetrators' and women as 'victims' of violence. This paper argues and departs from such analyses on two levels-first, in order to analyse the political and social complexity of honour violence, we need to look at the various subject positions that women as well as men occupy in relation to HRV: as perpetrators, as witnesses, victims and as combatants. Second, all measures to combat violence need to engage men. In relation to the latter, the paper will engage with the ongoing work of the Sharaf Heroes in Sweden (Sharaf Hjältar).
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This article explores the policy underpinning Sweden's 1999 ban on purchases of sexual services with a focus on the social and health service sectors and their role vis-à-vis people who sell sex. It argues that the rationale behind the ban is difficult to reconcile with legislation and practices beyond the merit of criminal justice. While an understanding of prostitution as "men's violence against women" may serve symbolic functions at central policy level, it can hardly guide local implementation without conflicting with core social policy principles. The article concludes that a there is a need to address the agency of people who sell sex, since denying or minimizing such agency may be counterproductive to the policy's own objectives.
Conversations across Borders: Men and Honour Related Violence in U.K. and Sweden
Norma, 2009
This paper engages with debates on honour related violence (HRV) in the U.K. and Sweden and positions these debates within the broader context of media representations and multiculturalism. The paper highlights two interrelated arguments. First, though academic and policy interventions have made HRV more visible, they have inadvertently reproduced an anti-male rhetoric that fails to expose the vulnerability of men and the shifting subject positions that men can occupy in relation to HRV; as perpetrators, as victims, as observers or as agents of change. Second, these interventions fail to acknowledge that male initiatives to challenge practices of HRV are extremely important to break cycles of gendered violence. In relation to the latter, the paper critically engages with the Sharaf Heroes Project, a unique male intervention in Sweden that works preventively with young boys and men towards challenging and changing attitudes on honour-related violence.