Torn Apart: Structural Racism and the Targeting of Muslim Mothers by Child Welfare

Abstract

The problems resulting from mechanisms of institutional racism within Swedish social services have harmed many families of migrant background and created serious problems with the integration of those families into Swedish society. This article investigates the experiences of eight Muslim mothers in Sweden who were accused of Shaken Baby Syndrome and later acquitted. All the women were separated from their children for extended periods and held in pre-trial detention. Employing a qualitative, feminist-informed methodology, this study explores how an intersection of structural discrimination, flawed medical assumptions, and institutional racism served to shape their experiences. It reveals how racialised and gendered identities rendered these mothers inherently suspect, positioning them as unfit caregivers within a child welfare system that privileges (contested) biomedical narratives over contextual understanding. The article highlights the epistemic and emotional consequences of relying on scientifically disputed diagnostic criteria in child protection, and how such reliance perpetuates systemic injustice. The findings underscore the need for critical reform in both social work and legal frameworks, to address systemic injustice and prevent the unwarranted separation of families.

Introduction

A central responsibility of social service authorities is to protect children from circumstances that may compromise their health and development. However, this well-intentioned mission can, in practice, have the opposite effect. Harm often arises from a combination of insufficient knowledge among social workers and structural, institutionalised discrimination that disproportionately affect families with migrant backgrounds. These issues have been extensively documented in critical scholarship on social work and child protection in Sweden and other countries (e.g., Dominelli, 2010; Eliassi, 2013; Ferguson & Woodward, 2009; Garrett, 2009; Grim, 2025; Kamali, 2015; Lavalette & Penketh, 2014; Wroe & Vaughn, 2025). Previous research has shown that Swedish welfare institutions, such as municipal social services and healthcare, alongside other key institutions, including educational, political, and judicial institutions, are discriminatory toward individuals and families with migrant or minority backgrounds in general, and Muslims families in particular (Adman & Jansson, 2017; Baianstovu & Strid, 2024; Bursell, 2021; Eliassi, 2017; Jönsson, 2025; Rosvall & Öhrn, 2014; SOU, 2006). Despite this body of research, political developments in recent decades, including the electoral success of racist and xenophobic parties, have further undermined equitable social work practices, particularly impacting Muslim families. Growing anti-Muslimism in Sweden and beyond exemplifies this trend (Bakali & Hafez, 2023; Groglopo et al., 2025; Mirrlees & Ibaid, 2021; Mulinari & Neergard, 2012).

This article examines how flawed forensic science and systemic bias intersect within child protection systems in Sweden, producing disproportionately harmful outcomes for racialised Muslim mothers. Focusing on mothers accused of child abuse under the label of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) (now more commonly referred to as Abusive Head Trauma), the study investigates how such diagnoses operate not only as medical constructs but also as institutional mechanisms that facilitate racialised family separation under a veneer of scientific objectivity. While social services are mandated to protect children, their practices can cause harm when informed by flawed science and institutional racism. Historically, child protection systems have reflected colonial and exclusionary logics, surveilling and criminalising marginalised families rather than supporting them (Dominelli, 2010; Eliassi, 2013; Finch et al., 2022; Garrett, 2006; Kamali, 2015). For Muslim families, these systems often function as instruments of state control (Bano, 2017; Herz, 2018).

SBS remains one of the most controversial and persistently misapplied diagnostic categories in child protection. Based on the so-called triad of subdural haematoma, retinal haemorrhage, and cerebral oedema, SBS has been increasingly challenged in medical and legal literature. Evidence now suggests that these symptoms may arise from non-abusive causes, such as birth trauma, infections, genetic conditions, and coagulopathies (Donohue, 2003). Despite such critiques, SBS continues to be treated as near-conclusive evidence of abuse in many jurisdictions, including the UK and Sweden (Högberg et al., 2020; SBU, 2016; Tuerkheimer, 2020; Victor, 2015). This is even while a landmark decision by the Swedish Supreme Court in 2014 (NJA, 2014; Victor, 2015) resulted in the acquittal of a father previously convicted of SBS, citing the lack of diagnostic certainty. Similarly, the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services (SBU) have concluded that there is insufficient scientific evidence to establish that the triad alone reliably indicates shaking (SBU, 2016). Yet, in practice, Swedish and UK social services often treat the triad as definitive proof, with devastating emotional, legal, and familial consequences (Donohue, 2003; Högberg et al., 2020). Social service decisions to place children in custody are often made by municipal political boards without professional social work experience, uncritically following social services’ recommendations. This procedural mechanisation leaves little room for critical scrutiny or democratic oversight. As Herz (2018) notes, although social services operate within legal and policy frameworks, those who carry out decisions bring normative assumptions and culturally inflected interpretations. This poses profound risks for Muslim families, where decisions about child welfare are frequently shaped not by evidence but by racialised ideas of “good parenting” and ethnocentric notions of family life. Protests against forced removals are often dismissed as paranoia or politicised campaigns, framed as security concerns amid a climate of securitisation affecting Swedish social services (Finch et al., 2022). Despite being contested in international medical literature (Donohue, 2003; SBU, 2016), SBS allegations continue to be used to justify custody removals and incarceration of Muslim parents.

The aim of this study, then, is to explore how Muslim mothers, accused and later acquitted of causing SBS, experience such allegations and how these experiences intersect with the socio-legal exercise of authority and institutional racism. In the analysis, it is explored how do these mothers’ narratives reveal the operation of wider structural forces — including racialisation, gendered surveillance, and institutional power — within child-welfare systems.

Methodology

This study is based on in-depth narrative interviews with eight Muslim mothers in Sweden who had been accused, and subsequently acquitted, of Shaken Baby Syndrome. While ethnicity, language, and religion were not explicit selection criteria, all participants identified as Muslim women with migrant and non-European backgrounds.

Data Collection and Analysis

Data collection took place in one of Sweden's larger cities between October 2021 and June 2023, involving eight mothers aged 28–35 years. Participants were recruited through personal networks, support groups, and snowball sampling. Participants had to be mothers [ages 18 or older, living in Sweden, who] at some point [were] involved with child protection and social services, in relation to SBS investigation, accusation, and later acquittal. Interviews, lasting between one and three hours, were conducted in secure locations chosen by participants, most often in separate rooms at local libraries. Participants were fully informed about the study's aims, and consent was obtained prior to each interview.

Since one of the authors, who interviewed the participants, is fluent in both Swedish and Arabic, the interviews were conducted in both languages. All sessions were audio-recorded with consent, before being transcribed [in Swedish], anonymised, and analysed with particular attention paid to themes of power, affect, credibility, and institutional violence. Texts were coded and categorised, taking into consideration participants’ explicit perspectives and emergent themes. A thematic narrative analysis (Caine et al., 2013) enabled in-depth interpretation of meanings within participants’ stories, producing three dominant themes: institutional racism and inaccessibility, psychosocial harm, and racialised narratives. These themes illuminate how racialised and gendered constructions of deviance permeate medical, legal, and welfare systems.

Reflexivity and Legal Semiotics

This research has foregrounded reflexivity as a methodological principle. The focus of the research did not emerge from a neutral or abstract question, but from a tension between lived experience and institutional practice, between mothers’ voices and the systems that refused to hear them. The methodology was, therefore, conceived not as a detached technical framework but as a political stance, resisting the silencing of mothers within legal and professional discourse. In line with feminist, postcolonial, and critical socio-legal traditions, the research here was understood as relational, situated, and affective, acknowledging that knowledge is always partial, embodied, and contingent (Crenshaw, 1991; Haraway, 1988; Pillow, 2015).

The positionality of the authors, shaped by their lived identities as mothers, professionals working in CPS, migrant support services, and social services have been constitutive of the study. In addition, one of the authors has lived experiences as a racialised Muslim and Arabic-speaking mother. These positions informed the framing of questions, the interpretation of data, and the articulation of resistance. Prior extensive engagement within social and legal contexts had revealed to the authors the pervasiveness of migrants’ fear and suspicion of Swedish social services, alongside a felt need for vigilance in encounters with social authorities. Such experience in the field provided the grounding for a critical analysis of the epistemic, racialised, and affective dynamics at play for migrant mothers, highlighting how institutional actors construct credibility and assign “truth” through and within bureaucratic and legal processes (Jonsson & Jönsson, 2025).

Feminist Ethics and Relational Accountability

During data collection, participants were treated as co-witnesses rather than mere data points, aligning with feminist methodological principles of mutuality, care, and ethical responsibility (Hesse-Biber, 2014; Oakley, 1981). Interviews were conducted as open-ended conversations, providing safe spaces for expressing emotion and the freedom to refuse to answer any particular question. Ethical decision-making extended beyond formal consent procedures, following Guillemin and Gillam's (2004) notion of “ethically important moments”: what to ask, what to omit, what to record, and what to protect. The use of narrative methods (Riessman, 2008) enabled the women to shape their own stories, allowing for moments of silence, fragmentation, and affect. Analysis followed, then, a feminist narrative approach (Caine et al., 2013), emphasising the entanglement of structure and self, and the shaping of lives by racism, migration, motherhood, and legal authority.

By situating maternal narratives in the institutional context of Swedish child welfare system, the methodology sought to reveal the semiotic construction of legal truth — how institutional language, medical categories, and procedural norms operate as systems of meaning that define credibility and guilt. This approach has served to illuminate how knowledge claims, ostensibly neutral, are racially and culturally coded, assigning authority to professionals while devaluing mothers’ lived expertise.

Methodological Contributions

This methodological orientation has offered several contributions. First, it has exposed the persistent gap between professional practice and emerging medical critique; as explained earlier, although the SBS triad is increasingly contested, it continues to structure interventions without reflection on evidentiary reliability. Second, it has illuminated epistemic hierarchies that privilege medical expertise over maternal testimony, revealing how effective and relational knowledge is systematically devalued. Third, it has highlighted the racialisation of parenting, showing how gendered assumptions of “dangerous motherhood” intersect with Islamophobia and postcolonial logics, situating child protection practices within broader structures of racial governance. Fourth, attention to the removal of children during critical attachment periods has demonstrated the importance of temporality and uncertainty in assessing impacts on children's rights. Fifth, the approach has foregrounded institutional deafness, making visible the systematic dismissal of mothers’ critiques and the insulation of professionals from accountability. Sixth, the methodological approach used to study Muslim mothers who have been criminalised, disbelieved, and pathologised was inherently an act of political refusal. It resisted reproducing epistemic hierarchies that position law, medicine, and bureaucracy as inherently credible while rendering racialised women's voices suspect (Fricker, 2007; Tuerkheimer, 2009). Such an approach has worked to honour the trust of participants and foreground the structural violence embedded in state practices.

Taken together, these contributions position the methodology as a critical lens for interrogating how authority, knowledge, and racialised assumptions are reproduced in child welfare decision-making. Importantly, by emphasising the semiotics of legal and institutional truth (how meaning, credibility, and evidence are constructed), the methodological lens has a theoretical underpinning that requires unpacking. This is the focus of the next section.

Theoretical and Legal Framework: Building a Critical Socio-Legal, Anti-Racist Perspective

This section situates the study within a critical socio-legal and theoretical framework that interrogates the interplay of law, science, and power in the construction of suspicion, risk, and harm. This framework is indispensable for understanding the experiences of Muslim mothers accused of SBS, whose encounters with legal and welfare institutions are mediated through intersecting structures of race, gender, class, and religion. The analysis draws on feminist postcolonial theory, and more specifically conceptions of intersectionality, postcolonialism, structural racism and discrimination, and anti-Muslimism (Ahmed, 2012; Crenshaw, 1991; Roberts, 2002), to reveal how social and institutional hierarchies shape both evidentiary practices and the lived realities of mothers entangled in child protection proceedings.

The framing of SBS as both a medical and legal category exposes a deeper epistemic tension: how law translates uncertain science into institutional “truth”. As Tuerkheimer (2009, 2020) argues, courts and authorities often privilege medical expertise over experiential testimony, transforming contestable evidence into factual certainty. This epistemic privileging results in what Fricker (2007) calls “epistemic injustice,” where marginalised subjects – in this instance, racialised mothers – are denied credibility in narrating their own experiences. Such practices cannot be disentangled from broader histories of state control and surveillance over racialised motherhood, nor from the global circulation of colonial knowledge that constructs non-Western mothers as deficient or dangerous (Abu-Lughod, 1989; Mohanty, 1984).

Postcolonialism here provides a crucial analytic lens for examining how colonial discourses persist in child protection systems. These discourses reproduce hierarchies of civilisation and moral worth that position “white” Western motherhood as the norm while pathologising non-Western parenting (Abu-Lughod, 1989; Jönsson, 2010; Mulinari et al., 2020). Within Swedish social work and judicial practice, such hierarchies are reproduced through epistemic and bureaucratic systems that claim universality while being embedded with Eurocentric assumptions (Jönsson, 2014). As Mohanty (1984) contends, white feminism often neglects how race, religion, and coloniality shape women's oppression. Muslim women, in particular, are subjected to “cultural imperialism” when Western norms of emancipation and childrearing are projected onto them, undermining their agency and pathologising their cultural difference.

The concept of structural racism and discrimination further elucidates how legal and welfare institutions reproduce inequalities through ostensibly neutral rules and procedures (de los Reyes & Kamali, 2005; Kamali, 2008). Structural discrimination manifests when legal processes, such as risk assessments or evidentiary standards, systematically disadvantage racialised groups under the guise of objectivity. Research conducted for a state inquiry on structural discrimination (part of the Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU) series) has demonstrated that minorities are treated more harshly within the judiciary and welfare systems (SOU, 2005, p. 30), revealing how the principle of equality before the law — as embodied by Regeringsformen (The Instrument of the Government) 1974:152, c. 1, s. 2 — remains aspirational rather than actualised. This dynamic is reinforced by institutional “gatekeeping” practices that privilege whiteness as a default assumption of trustworthiness (Devos & Banaji, 2005; DiTomaso et al., 2007; Fiske, 2010).

Anti-Muslimism constitutes a particularly entrenched form of structural racism within Swedish society, sustained through political discourse, media narratives, and institutional practices (Kamali, 2008; Said, 1979). Anti-Muslim bias has intensified since the “War on Terror,” in which heightened scrutiny of Muslim families has been legitimised under the pretext of safeguarding children (EUMC, 2006; FRA, 2017). This framing transforms Muslim parents into risk subjects within the legal welfare complex. As Sekerka and Yacobian (2018) note, anti-Muslimism operates beyond fear at the interpersonal level; it functions as a structural logic that justifies surveillance and exclusion. Within this system, medicalised narratives of abuse serve as moral technologies of control, reinforcing a Eurocentric child protection paradigm that conflates difference with danger.

From a legal standpoint, Sweden's child protection regime rests on a complex interplay between criminal, administrative, and human rights law, including the following pieces of legislation: Brottsbalken (The Swedish Penal Code) 1962:700; Socialtjänstlagen (The Social Services Act) 2025:400 (hereafter SoL); Lag med särskilda bestämmelser om vård av unga (Act with special provisions on the care of young people) 1990:52 (hereafter LVU); Patientlagen (The Patient Act) 2014:821; and Hälso- och sjukvårdslagen (The Health and Medical Services Act) 2017:30. These frameworks are further shaped by supranational norms, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 1989, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) 1950, and EU law (Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union 2000/C 364/01; The Race Equality Directive 2000/43/EC). Articles 8 and 14 of ECHR 1950 and Article 3 of CRC 1989 require that interventions respect family life, non-discrimination, and proportionality, while Diskrimineringslagen (The Discrimination Act) 2008:567 and, as mentioned above, the Instrument of the Government 1974:152 enshrine equality before the law. Yet, in practice, these principles are frequently undermined by the evidentiary dominance of medical expertise, which translates contested scientific claims into a seemingly objective legal truth (SBU, 2016; Tuerkheimer, 2020).

Towards a Critical Legal Theory of Child Protection

A critical legal theory of child protection must account for how law produces and legitimises its own truths. Drawing on legal semiotics, this perspective interrogates how meaning is constructed through the legal language of harm, credibility, and risk. Legal semiotics as an analytic approach emphasises that law does not merely describe reality, but constructs it through signs, symbols, and interpretive practices that carry ideological weight (Goodrich, 1987; Jackson, 1995). Within child protection, this construction occurs when social workers, physicians, and judges interpret bodily signs, such as bruises or haemorrhages, as legal and moral indicators of guilt or innocence. These semiotic practices transform uncertain medical data into moral narratives about parental deviance, shaped by racialised and gendered assumptions.

In SBS cases, the triad of subdural haematoma, retinal haemorrhage, and cerebral oedema becomes a legal signifier of violence — a symbolic shorthand that substitutes for proof (Donohue, 2003; SBU, 2016). Through repetition across reports, hearings, and judgments, the triad gains legal legitimacy, producing what Foucault would describe as “regimes of truth,” where expert knowledge defines reality. In this semiotic process, the authority of science is fused with the authority of law, resulting in an epistemic closure that excludes alternative interpretations, especially those voiced by racialised mothers. The juridical translation of contested science thus becomes a semiotic act of power: it naturalises uncertainty as certainty and silences subaltern knowledge.

This authority dynamic reveals the deeper convergence of law, science, and social control. By foregrounding epistemic authority as a linguistic and symbolic practice, the use of legal semiotics exposes how institutional actors encode bias into the very process of interpretation. The “best interests of the child” principle, although enshrined in both Swedish and international law (SoL 2025:400; LVU 1990:52; CRC 1989, art. 3), becomes an empty signifier that can be filled with culturally biased meanings. What counts as a “safe” or “fit” parent is filtered through racialised expectations of care, morality, and family structure (Herz, 2018; Razack, 2008). As a result, procedural safeguards, such as those required by ECHR 1950 (art. 6) and CRC 1989 (art. 12), are undermined when mothers’ voices are systematically discredited through interpretive bias.

The concept of legal truth, therefore, cannot be understood apart from its semiotic foundations: it is a truth produced through institutionalised systems of meaning-making that reflect and reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and power. Within the Swedish child protection system, these semiotic processes intersect with the aforementioned concepts of postcolonialism, structural racism and discrimination, and anti-Muslimism, transforming racialised mothers into symbols of deviance and risk. The law, under the guise of objectivity, reproduces colonial patterns of epistemic domination, where “Western science” and “legal rationality” stand as arbiters of truth against the lived experiences of marginalised others (Eliassi, 2013; Kamali, 2015).

A critical legal theory of child protection, thus, demands not only doctrinal reform but epistemic transformation. It calls for recognition of epistemic plurality, whereby anti-racist knowledge is valued alongside professional expertise, and insists on procedural mechanisms that ensure genuine participation, as required under international law (CRC 1989, arts. 3, 12 and 19; ECHR 1950, arts. 6, 8 and 13; Jonsson, 2023a, 2023b, 2025). Moreover, it requires dismantling the semiotic hierarchies that equate whiteness, secularism, and Western science with neutrality. By confronting how legal meaning is constructed and whose voices are authorised within that construction, such a theory reimagines child protection as a field of justice rather than of domination.

In this sense, law must be approached as both a site of harm and a (potential) site of resistance. When mothers’ testimonies are recognised not as suspect but as legitimate sources of knowledge, the legal system begins to fulfil its obligations under equality and non-discrimination frameworks (The Discrimination Act 2008:567; CERD; EU Charter 2000/C 364/01, art. 21). Building on critical, feminist, and postcolonial traditions, a transformative approach to child protection would reorient institutional practice towards reflexivity, accountability, and epistemic justice, ensuring that law serves as a mechanism of care rather than of coercion. Legal semiotics as an approach offers a concrete pathway towards this transformation, by reconfiguring how institutional actors interpret and signify evidence, culture, and intent. In doing so, interpretive practices themselves become sites of reform, capable of operationalising Sweden's commitments under ECHR 1950, CRC 1989, and EU equality law. Anti-racist legal education revised evidentiary guidelines, and anti-discriminatory reflexive assessment protocols could, together, reshape how “truth” is constructed and who is recognised as a credible knower — transforming the semiotic foundation of child protection, from one of exclusion to one of recognition and justice.

Findings and Analysis

The analysis of participants’ narratives revealed three, interrelated, themes: institutional racism and inaccessibility; psychosocial harm; and racialised narratives. These themes illustrate how Swedish child protection authorities (SoL 2025:400, c. 14, s.1; LVU 1990:52) and the broader legal framework (The Swedish Penal Code 1962:700, c. 3, ss. 5–6; The Health and Medical Services Act 2017:30; The Patient Act 2014:821) operate within institutional, epistemic, and structural hierarchies that disproportionately affect Muslim mothers. Participants’ experiences demonstrate how contested medical diagnoses, procedural authority, and systemic biases intersect to produce harm, while revealing the limits of formal rights under domestic and international law (CRC 1989, art. 12; ECHR 1950, arts. 6, 8 and 13; Högberg et al., 2020). In this context, the law itself becomes a semiotic system in which institutional signs — medical reports, procedural documents, and social service narratives — construct maternal “truth” and legitimacy (legal semiotics), often marginalising racialised voices.

Institutional Racism and Inaccessibility

Institutionalised power is exercised through legal, procedural, and bureaucratic authority, where social services, healthcare, and law enforcement act as gatekeepers. The mothers participating in the study repeatedly described encounters with child protection authorities as opaque, authoritarian, and unresponsive to their knowledge or evidence. Aisha, whose child was removed while she was in custody, explained:

When I was in custody, I did not know whether my son was alive or dead … No matter whom I asked, the response was always the same: confidentiality, confidentiality, confidentiality … My son was ill — he needed his mother more than anything in the world, and I was not with him.

This example illustrates how formal procedural safeguards under SoL 2025:400, c.14, s.1 and LVU 1990:52, intended to protect children, can be operationalised in ways that deny a mother access to critical information, producing epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007; Tuerkheimer, 2009). Here, the semiotic construction of legal “truth” privileged institutional narratives over lived experience, rendering Aisha powerless.

Feeling powerless was an experience common to all the research participants, as was a feeling of having, to various different degrees, lost control over their lives. They expressed this sense of helplessness and powerlessness in relation to their child, and their inability to meet their child's needs made them feel inadequate and incapable as mothers. Sajaa, who was taken into custody, described this feeling:

I was sitting in custody, a place I never, even in my wildest imagination, thought I would ever visit. My breasts were leaking and leaking, and I kept thinking that my son was hungry, and that I couldn’t feed him. I couldn’t even feed my child; he needed me and I couldn’t. What kind of mother was I then?

Aila's experience, meanwhile, demonstrates how racialised assumptions shape the production of official documentation: “I explained that they were Mongolian spots … Yet the word ‘bruises’ remained in the documentation … Even one year later, this had not been corrected … Only their interpretation of everything was allowed to matter.” In instances such as Aila's, then, social service records function as instruments of legal and epistemic authority, codifying assumptions that effectively criminalise maternal behaviour. The persistence of this “authorised truth” reflects structural discrimination (de los Reyes & Kamali, 2005; Feagin, 2013; SOU, 2005, p. 30) and demonstrates how legal semiotics — where documentation and institutional representations become evidence in themselves — can reinforce systemic injustice.

Gatekeeping within institutions further compounds marginalisation. Zeinab, a nurse, recounted being accused of aggression for intervening when her child was mistreated: “I said, ‘Take him inside first — don’t undress him out here.’ That moment came to cost me my entire life … The nurse did not listen to me … She destroyed me.” Medical authority, legitimised through the Health and Medical Services Act 2017:30 and the Patient Act 2014:821, intersected with racialised perceptions to construct Zeinab's actions as deviant. Anti-Muslim bias translated professional concern into evidence of aggression (Corbin, 2017; Kamali, 2008), exemplifying how institutional signs (testimony, reports) can mediate the construction of legal truth and social legitimacy.

Psychosocial Harm

Institutional marginalisation produced profound psychosocial consequences for the mothers participating in the study. Leyla, a lawyer and child protection professional, recounted: “I have worked with children at risk … They completely ignored who I was — my knowledge, my competence … All they saw was a potential child abuser.” Even expertise relevant to child welfare could not counteract racialised assumptions embedded in legal and welfare frameworks (SoL 2025:400; LVU 1990:52; CRC, art. 3). Kime described being rendered invisible: “It was as if my words left my mouth and passed straight through the social worker … My presence, my stories, everything about me seemed to disturb her.” Aisha similarly highlighted the emotional toll she experienced: “I have never felt as exposed, helpless, and powerless as I did sit in a meeting with social services … It felt like being attacked, humiliated, slandered, and trampled on.”

These experiences reflect the psychosocial consequences of epistemic and structural violence (Farmer, 2004), where the semiotic authority of social service documentation, risk assessments, and procedural narratives systematically invalidates Muslim mothers’ experiences, producing trauma and a sense of powerlessness (MacIntyre et al., 2023).

Racialised Narratives

The interviewees’ narratives also reveal how culturally coded assumptions inform credibility and risk assessment. Nora described being removed from her child's hospital room for praying:

1 remember shouting, ‘Oh Allah’, and continuing in panic … The doctor just looked at me angrily and said, ‘Now you have to stop’ … Later, they wrote in the concern report that I had shouted at my child and exposed him to high volumes of noise … Although I didn't actually shout, the prosecutor invoked this in court, saying I should have realised that my shouting could have damaged my son's hearing.

Aisha similarly recounted: “I spoke to my husband in Arabic … I just did it spontaneously … They had stated we were behaving suspiciously … What is ‘generally worrying behaviour’? How can she conclude that?” Roa described her emotional collapse as having been interpreted as parental incapacity: “I broke down … I didn’t think about it … Those screams … they broke my family apart … When I had calmed down, the police were waiting for me.”

These different narratives show how social services and courts rely on culturally coded interpretations that racialise and pathologise maternal conduct. Legal and procedural instruments (SoL 2025:400; LVU 1990:52; the Swedish Penal Code 1962:700; CRC 1989, art. 12; ECHR 1950, arts. 6, 8 and 13) mediate these interpretations, reinforcing epistemic hierarchies where institutional signs — medical evidence, social service reports, witness statements — become markers of legal truth, while lived experiences are systematically discounted.

Across these examples, contested medical diagnoses (SBU, 2016) and institutional documentation operate as semiotic systems, shaping the construction of legal truth and determining whose knowledge counts. The mothers’ narratives, however, provide empirical evidence of systemic injustice, showing how the authority of law and child protection mechanisms is intertwined with racialised, gendered, and religious assumptions, producing both procedural and psychosocial harm. The semiotic lens reveals that legal “truth” in child protection is negotiated through institutional signs and power hierarchies, highlighting the critical need for procedural transparency, anti-racist and anti-discriminatory informed assessment, and reflexive engagement with expert evidence.

Postcolonial feminist perspectives highlight how colonial assumptions pathologise non-Western motherhood and uphold Eurocentric norms (Abu-Lughod, 1989; Mohanty, 1984). The concept of intersectionality (see, for instance, Crenshaw, 1991) elucidates how overlapping structures of race, religion, gender, and class produce complex vulnerabilities, shaping both the perception and treatment of Muslim mothers. Conceptions of structural racism and anti-Muslimism further explain how social, legal, and medical institutions normalise discriminatory practices and reproduce systemic inequality, often without conscious intent (de los Reyes & Kamali, 2005; Feagin, 2013; Sekerka & Yacobian, 2018).

Concluding Remarks with Policy Recommendations: Towards a Feminist, Anti-Racist, and Decolonial Social Work

This study has critically examined how Muslim mothers experience wrongful SBS accusations in Sweden, situating their narratives within broader patterns of institutional racism, flawed medical authority, and gendered surveillance. Although the empirical focus of the current study is Sweden, these dynamics resonate across jurisdictions where child protection systems intersect with contested medical diagnosis and minority families. The findings demand urgent reforms in social work and child protection even in other countries, while challenging assumptions of neutrality in these systems. SBS operates not merely as a contested medical diagnosis but as a site where legal, medical, and institutional epistemologies converge, producing legal truths that often marginalise and silence racialised mothers. The law's regard for contested expert knowledge, as discussed through legal semiotics, shows how certain forms of expertise are naturalised as authoritative, while situated knowledge of lived experiences of racialised groups are discounted. Institutional practices are not neutral but actively influence the construction of meaning – framing Muslim mothers’ actions as deviant and their voices as unreliable, thereby reproducing structural injustice.

In deploying this critical socio-legal and theoretical framework, the research has seen three interwoven themes emerge. First, instances of institutional racism and inaccessibility manifested in the form of opaque, authoritarian processes where dialogue with social services was blocked by mistrust and systemic bias. Mothers were rarely treated as partners in care; instead, they were positioned as suspects. The study reveals how structural racism, anti-Muslim bias, and institutional authority intersect to silence knowledge and disempower mothers, exemplifying epistemic injustice and the semiotics of legal truth discussed earlier.

Second, instances of psychosocial harm manifested in the form of family separations, wrongful detentions, and character defamation, leaving long-lasting trauma. Here, infants were denied essential attachment, and mothers were deprived of dignity and agency. The narratives of the mothers show how institutional power and epistemic authority translate into profound psychological and relational harm, demonstrating the lived consequences of structural discrimination.

Third, racialised narratives framed mothers’ actions through orientalist and anti-Muslim lenses, reducing complex parental practices to simplistic markers of deviance. The analysis shows that institutional interpretations of conduct are socially and culturally coded, constructing legal “truths” that systematically disadvantage racialised mothers. By integrating legal semiotics, it becomes clear that law, science, and institutional practice collectively shape these narratives, privileging biomedical and bureaucratic authority while marginalising situated knowledge of racialised groups.

Policy reform must, therefore, address both systemic and medical failings. Reliance on the SBS triad alone should no longer constitute sufficient grounds for child removal. Suspected abuse cases must be reviewed independently and interdisciplinarily, ensuring that both biomedical and experiential knowledge are equally considered. Mandatory anti-racism training for social workers and medical professionals, alongside oversight mechanisms for SBS-related interventions, are essential. Parents must have meaningful participation in investigations and proceedings, and community-based, anti-discriminatory support systems should be prioritised to provide care rather than to exercise control.

Reconceptualising child protection as a site of relational care rather than coercion requires centring the dignity, knowledge, and humanity of all families. A feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial framework emphasises trust, equity, and structural awareness, recognising that legal and institutional authority is never neutral but always semiotically charged. By foregrounding epistemic justice, semiotic awareness, and the relational dynamics of authority, the law and social services can function not merely as instruments of control but as mechanisms for genuine protection, equity, and accountability. Ultimately, the mothers’ narratives remind us that behind every case file is a lived human reality that must be acknowledged, heard, and respected, and that the construction of legal truth must account for both scientific contestation and the situated experiences of those affected. This integration of postcolonial feminist theory, structural racism, and legal semiotics illustrates that meaningful reform requires both institutional reflexivity and the active centring of marginalised voices in the production of knowledge, policy, and practice.