The aim of the paper is to contribute to the expanding knowledge-base for reducing honour related violence (HRV), that has becomeincreasingly complicated, not to say corrupt, by ongoing neoliberalism and right-wing agendas.
HRV is a serious problem with complex roots, causes and sometimes deadly consequences. It is a contested academic and political fieldconstructed through various borders, boundaries, and intersections such as nation, ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, religion, and migration.
The paper examines some of these borders, boundaries, and intersections by analysing the expressions, prevalence, and patterns of HRV in Sweden, a historically social democratic and femocratic welfare state, challenged by increasing social, economic, and political inequalities,and a mainstream discourse describing HRV as a distinctively dangerous form of violence linked to culture, religion, and migrants’ failure to‘assimilate’ to Nordic ideals of gender equality. As such, positionings on HRV have played and continue to play straight into the hands ofnationalist politics, racist agendas, and right-wing assimilationism.
In contrast, the paper draws on feminist and intersectional sociological theory, at the interface of honour, integration, migration, to develop theconcepts of isolation and mobility. It is based on a substantial qualitative and quantitative empirical material: focus groups and individual in-depth interviews with people with direct, personal experiences and indirect, professional experiences of HRV (n=259) and three surveysanswered by fifteen-year-olds in Swedish metropolitan areas (n=6002).
The paper shows first, how isolation and mobility reinforce or weakenhonour norms and violence, respectively
2021.
15th European Sociological Association Conference (ESA 2021), (Virtual Conference), Barcelona, Spain, August 31 - September 3, 2021