Complexities facing social work: Honor-based violence as lived reality and stereotype

Abstract

Summary

It is widely accepted that honor-based violence is a lived reality and a serious problem. However, honor-based violence is also a contested academic and political field, characterized by a polarized debate about whether or not the violence comprises stereotyping images of immigrants. This article asks how honor-based violence can be understood in light of this polarization, and what consequences it may have for clients and social workers. It is based on interview data with 235 adults with either professional (n = 199) or personal experiences (n = 36) of honor-based violence in Sweden. The data has been thematically coded and analyzed using the concepts of culturalization and intersectionality.

Findings

Honor-based violence is simultaneously a lived reality and teeming with stereotypes that are constructed by culturalizing images of nation, gender, age, religion, and sexuality. These stereotypes constitute forms of violence themselves and decrease clients’ trust in society and its institutions. Hence, the stereotypes become obstacles to social workers’ capacity to support those exposed to violence. At a general level, the stereotypes contribute to retaining the exposed in violence. In contrast, intersectional approaches to understanding honor-based violence have the potential to capture clients’ self-perceived and complex formulations of the causes of, and the character of, their situation, and thus increase the possibilities for adequate support.

Applications

The article's findings can support social workers’ understanding of the complexity of honor-based violence and strengthen their possibilities and capacities to develop antiracist and nonviolent communicative practices and, thus, acknowledge clients’ varying experiences and individual needs.

The overarching question that underpins this article is how social workers can address interpersonal violence in segregated groups and support victims, without simultaneously contributing to racism and discrimination. The article offers an analysis of the challenges experienced by social workers in dealing with honor-based violence, which are located in the tension between different understandings and experiences, more specifically, between understandings of violence as lived experience and/or as a stereotypical image of immigrant lifestyles, and clients’ experiences of honor-based violence and the support provided by social services. It analyzes the consequences of these understandings and experiences for clients who are exposed to violence in their family lives, and for social workers’ capacity to provide adequate and sustainable support. We ask how social work can address violence in marginalized minority groups and support victims without contributing to racism and discrimination. As such, the question bears resemblance to the so-called Crenshaw's Dilemma (Crenshaw, 1989): how do we make visible (violence within and against) marginalized minority groups without simultaneously stigmatizing those very same groups? (cf. Walby et al., 2012). From this position of complexity, we explore four questions: (a) Which stereotypical images are expressed by the responsible professionals and persons who experience honor-based violence themselves? (b) What are their consequences and challenges? (c) How do social workers handle them? and (d) What could mitigate these challenges?

The problem and its context

While there is an agreement in social work research that social work holds a crucial position in the work against honor-based violence, social workers experience serious difficulties in handling it (Baianstovu, 2012, 2017; Baianstovu et al., 2019; Hoppstadius, 2020; Olsson & Bergman, 2021). The uncertainty and complexities faced by social workers substantially influence the possibility for clients to receive the right help at the right time, as the social services assess the victims’ support needs and control the allocation of resources in individual cases. This means that other service providers, such as safe houses and women's organizations, depend on the functioning of the social services.

Social workers in social services express uncertainty in handling violence in intimate relationships in general (Hoppstadius et al., 2021) and in matters of honor-based violence in particular (Baianstovu, 2012; Baianstovu et al., 2019; Olsson & Bergman, 2021). Studies attribute the increased attention to honor-based violence, compared to other forms of violence, to contexts that underscore “the otherness of ethnically categorized women” (Hoppstadius, 2020, p. 89). On the one hand, there is a risk of not recognizing violence as a lived reality, and thus failing to protect children and adults. On the other hand, there is a risk of falling into cultural stereotypes and acting in a discriminatory way toward parents and/or spouses from minority groups by wrongly accusing them of acting violently due to their national, ethnic, and/or religious background (Baianstovu, 2012; Baianstovu et al., 2019; de los Reyes, 2003; Mulinari, 2004). In general, the social workers’ sense of uncertainty is profoundly affected by the tension between honor-based violence as a lived reality and as a stereotype, because this tension constantly exposes social workers to multiple risks of making an incorrect assessment (Baianstovu, 2012, 2017; Baianstovu et al., 2019).

A polarized debate about honor-based violence as a lived reality and/or a stereotypical image of immigrants’ lifestyles and patterns of violence has been ongoing in Sweden for more than 2 decades (Baianstovu, 2017; de los Reyes, 2003; Keskinen, 2009; Larsson & Englund, 2004; Mulinari 2004; NCK, 2010). The polarization is driven by a cultural discourse emphasizing aspects of (im)migration, culture, and religion, in particular Islam, as the main cause and explanation of the existence of honor norms and honor-based violence (Alinia, 2020; NCK, 2010). Similar debates have taken place, for example, in Denmark (Jaffe-Walter, 2016), Britain (Siddiqui, 2016), Canada (Abji & Korteweg, 2021), Finland (Hong, 2014), and the United States (Hayes et al., 2016; Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005). In practice, the polarization expresses and perpetuates tensions that “aggravate both the acquisition of knowledge and the development of preventive measures” (City of Gothenburg, in Baianstovu et al., 2019). The polarization is an obstacle to sustainable support for those affected, and it accordingly affects social workers’ possibilities to provide professional support (Baianstovu, 2012; Baianstovu et al., 2019).

However, there is general agreement that honor-based violence is a serious problem that is based on explicitly authoritarian, patriarchal, age-hierarchical, heteronormative, and violence-legitimizing relationships (Abji & Korteweg, 2021; Baianstovu, 2017; Gill, 2006). In these relationships, violence is legitimized as a way for extended families to ensure their respectability among their peers (Bourdieu, 1993). It can include physical and psychological violence and abuse, sexual violence, forced marriages, economic and material violence, verbal threats, surveillance and control, and other harmful practices (Gill, 2006; Idriss, 2018).

The cultural discourse, supported by government actors and policies, has dominated the public knowledge production in Sweden (Alinia, 2020) since the early 2000s, when the murders of three young women in Sweden elevated honor-based violence to a specific policy field (Eldén, 2003). The murders raised questions about the shortcomings of social workers in Swedish social services, who were criticized for failing to prevent the killings by listening to the victims (Wikan, 2003, 2009). Following that, the devastating actions of social workers in 2006, when 20-year-old Abbas Rezai was murdered, shook the profession and called its competence into question (Wikan, 2009). The Abbas case began when Abbas and 16-year-old Zahra, both Hazara, fell in love. Abbas's family did not live in Sweden, but Zahra's did. Zahra's parents found Abbas unworthy of their daughter because of his family's lower status in the Hazara social system and forbade the relationship. Zarah fled to Abbas in a different part of Sweden and pleaded for help from the social services. They responded by sending her back to her family. Social workers trying to reconcile the two families drove Abbas to Zahra's family's home shortly after. That same night, he was brutally tortured and killed by Zahra's family (Wikan, 2009). For good reason, the case of Abbas put social workers under intense pressure.

Turning to social work in Sweden and its current conditions, we find a profession suffering from inadequate time frames, limited and reduced resources, and limited and reduced training opportunities for the knowledge development needed to do adequate work in which clients’ needs can be understood and met (Baianstovu & Ablett, 2020; Rogowski, 2010). In short, social work is being restructured by the effects of political, economic and social globalization, increasing the complexity of social problems while undermining the prerequisites for essential communicative work. Social workers are forced to resort to checklists and manuals, which they find sometimes unhelpful (Baianstovu, 2012; Garrett, 2018; Martinell Barfoed, 2019; Morley, 2015), and sometimes directly harmful (Midnattssol & Trolin, 2022).

The following sections provide the article's theoretical framework, describe the material and methods, and present the findings and the analysis. The article ends with the limitations of the study and the conclusions, including implications for practice and directions for future research.

Theoretical framework

Intersectionality

The concept of intersectionality describes the ways in which multiple power relations or inequalities coexist, mutually shape each other (Strid et al., 2013), and are compounded to “create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking” (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 149). No one is just a woman or a man, or just hetero- or homosexual, or just white or middle class. Rather, gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, nationality and socioeconomic factors coexist simultaneously and position people differently in different contexts and along multiple axes of power. To add to the complexity, various factors are constructed along the lines of various perceptions, identities, categorizations, prejudices, and so on.

The potentiality of intersectionality as a starting point and analytical concept in this study lies in its connection to a specific concept of power. Intersectionality states that superiority and subordination are created in situations of interaction, through multidimensional constructions of categories and identities such as age, gender, class, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and more, in which culture and norms play an important role. The concept of intersectionality claims that power is always produced and therefore is inevitably present in all interactions (cf. Foucault, 2020), but the ways in which it operates, and its dynamics, are unique to each situation, depending on the categories and identities that are presented and staged. The strength of the concept of intersectionality is that it recognizes identities, categories, and power within situations of interaction (cf. Lykke, 2012) without losing sight of the privileged and powerful (Strid et al., 2013).

The relevance of intersectionality for this article is that interactions between social workers and their clients are not isolated events between concrete individuals. Instead, the people involved in the interaction are embedded in and associated with social groups (cf. Habermas, 1984), and as such they occupy various positions along different axes of power. Consequently, the concept of intersectionality has the analytical power to analyze understandings and expressions of honor-based violence as a lived reality and as a stereotype, how they are linked, and thus how they influence each other.

For social work, the concept of intersectionality can contribute to social workers’ awareness of different power relations at the micro, meso, and macro levels, and their impact on the processes of investigation and decision-making. Hence, intersectional awareness and analysis contribute to a critical awareness of power relations, which, in turn, enables just decisions and promotes social change (Baianstovu, 2017; Mattsson, 2021).

In contrast to the intersectional perspective, the cultural understanding of honor-based violence focuses solely on culture, assuming that culture is the most important factor in explaining violence among people from parts of the Middle East and Africa. In Sweden, research applying a cultural perspective has focused exclusively on the prevalence of girls’ experiences of violence, by and large in relation to restrictions on their sexual freedom (Schlytter et al., 2009; Schlytter & Linell, 2010). Such research explains honor-based violence in terms of a form of embodied culture, where individuals risk becoming representatives of their unchangeable culture (Alinia, 2020; Lavalette & Penketh, 2013). Although such research has filled a knowledge gap about one aspect of the problem, it has contributed to reinforcing boundaries between “us” and “them,” as it cements honor as an inherent cultural essence, beyond socioeconomic, generative mechanisms (Abji & Korteweg, 2021; Alinia, 2020; Baianstovu, 2017; Mulinari, 2004; Reimers, 2005). In this way, the cultural perspective has become culturalism, namely a culturally based racism (Larsson & Englund, 2004; Solomos & Back, 1996), which serves to create a moral distinction between better and worse people (cf. Elias & Scotson, 1994). While biologically based racism legitimizes moral differentiation through biology (cf. Elias & Scotson, 1994), the latter does so through culture. Both have colonial and postcolonial roots. The cultural perspective that dominates media debates and politics in contemporary Sweden (Alinia, 2020) is hereafter referred to as culturalization.

Method and materials

This article is based on qualitative empirical material collected in 2017–2018 as part of the Metropolitan Study, the largest study on honor-based violence carried out in Sweden, (Baianstovu et al., 2019). The material consists of semistructured focus group discussions and in-depth individual interviews with a total of 235 identified key individuals with knowledge about honor-based violence, either from their professional capacity of working with honor-based violence cases (N = 199; 189 women, 10 men), or from their personal experience of living in honor contexts (N = 36; 27 women, 9 men). The professionals participated in focus groups, and those with personal experience participated in individual in-depth interviews. ¹

Focus groups with professionals

A total of 59 focus groups were held in Sweden's three largest cities: 22 in Stockholm, 16 in Gothenburg, and 21 in Malmö. The sample was suitability-based and strategic and was the outcome of collaboration between the researchers and city officials and snowball sampling (Baianstovu et al., 2019).

The participants were social workers from the social services, school health services, sheltered housing, youth clinics, civil society organizations and hospitals, as well as lawyers, police officers, prosecutors, and youth leaders. Their professional experience ranged from ten to thirty years. One-third had a Middle Eastern language as their mother tongue, the rest Swedish.

Each of the 59 focus groups had between three and nine participants. Sometimes all participants shared the same profession and workplace, sometimes not.

The focus group discussions were guided by semistructured interview guides for public and civil society actors, respectively. The guides were designed to stimulate an open conversation by giving ample space to the participants’ varying experiences and perspectives. In general, the discussions were characterized by openness and sincerity. The guides included questions about the expressions, contexts and locations of the violence, the relationships between perpetrators and victims, the consequences of the violence for individuals, tensions between culturalist and intersectional understandings, obstacles to providing adequate support and, finally, their own and others’ perceived scope for action. Each interview lasted between 2 and 3 h.

Individual in-depth interviews

Participants were recruited for the individual in-depth interviews with the help of the focus group participants, who acted as gatekeepers. The sampling criteria were both purposive and ethical. Regarding ethics, the participants had to be over 18 years old and live a stable life. Regarding purpose, the participants had to have experience of both living in an honor context and of violence, as well as experience of support from public authorities or civil society. The participants had different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, ages, and sexual orientations. They identified as women, men, nonbinary, and transgender. They were aged 18–68 and were either employed or in education. Some were single and others were in relationships, with or without children. They had connections to countries stretching from Kosovo in the west to India in the east and Somalia in the south. Those who belonged to a fully or partially stateless ethnic group described themselves as Assyrian/Syriac, Kurdish, Mandean, Palestinian, Sikh, and Roma. Half of the participants grew up in Muslim families, one-third in Christian families, and the remainder in families with other religions or beliefs.

Some participants placed religion at the center of their family life, others in the periphery. Eight described themselves as LGBTQ. Their parents’ levels of education varied, as did their occupations. All had personal and family experiences of war and migration and maintained transnational contacts with extended family members. The interviews lasted between 1 and 3 h each.

The interviews were conducted with the support of a semistructured interview guide with narrative elements. The questions were centered around the individuals’ experiences of violence, the efforts of public services and civic organizations to help, the outcome of these efforts, and past and present living conditions in relation to their own and their families’ situation.

Analysis

The interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, coded, and thematically analyzed (cf. Danermark et al., 2019). The theme on which this article is based emerged as a cross-cutting theme in both the focus groups and the in-depth interviews. The theme was coded as stereotypes, conflicts, and racism, and was analyzed through the concepts of intersectionality and culturalization. The excerpts that we have chosen to highlight in the findings section below illuminate patterns found throughout the material. In the findings, FG stands for focus group and ID for in-depth interview.

Ethical considerations

The study has been examined and approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority. The ethical guidelines for research concerning information, consent, confidentiality, and use (Swedish Ethical Review Act, 2003, p. 460) were followed in all actions involving the research subjects. All participants gave their consent to participate in the study by e-mail or text message. They also received written information about the purpose of the data collection, how the data might be published, and their right to withdraw their consent at any point during the process. All workplaces and individuals are pseudonymized in the article so that no personal data or sensitive information can be linked to a workplace or an individual. The materials from the three cities have been merged into one in order to strengthen and protect the personal data of the participants.

Findings

The findings section follows the article's four research questions: stereotypical images, their consequences and challenges, how social workers handle them, and what could mitigate the challenges.

Stereotypical images

Nation and immigration

The empirical material reveals a common experience among social workers: they meet people who believe that “if there's violence or abuse or whatever in an immigrant family, then it's considered honor-based.” Thus, honor-based violence tends to be a symbol of social problems in families that are perceived as non-Swedish. For example, social workers encounter this stereotype in a project aimed at informing pupils living in honor contexts about sexual and individual rights. Schools often phone them to ask them to come and inform newly arrived immigrant pupils about honor-based violence. The project's social workers perceived that the school staff “assume that we are some project for new arrivals who need to learn Swedish rules and respect Swedish girls” (FG11). When this happens, they explain that the information project is not designed for newcomers in general, and that not all immigrants practise honor-based violence. These social workers perceive that the stereotypes reinforce a hierarchical division between Swedes and immigrants.

It often happens that teachers say to us, ‘Good that you come here and teach them some Swedish values!’ But we are there to talk about honor-based violence, so that introduction is completely wrong. Not all Swedes have peaceful values, and not all immigrants are violent and uncivilized. But that's the image they create in the students. […] I’m afraid it goes hand in hand with a kind of increased racism in society. (FG11)

The social workers’ experiences reveal persisting stereotypes about honor-based violence as something typical of immigrants, especially from the Middle East and Africa, and this functions as a demarcation line between belonging and not belonging. The bottom line is the belief that respecting girls is a particularly Swedish characteristic and that all immigrants need to learn to show such respect. Thus, honor-based violence becomes a symbol of immigrants’ (perceived) patriarchal and undemocratic worldviews.

A few in-depth interviews reveal individual experiences of constructive support. Looking deeper, we find cases where men's violence against women is interpreted as honor-based, with nationality being the only defining category. One example is a well-educated Iranian woman who, through contacts in her extended family, married an Iranian man living in Sweden. After years of violence and a period in sheltered housing, the woman's parents helped her out by buying her an apartment. This indicates that the violence was not considered legitimate within the family, even though the family structure was partly patriarchal.

Another aspect of nationality as a factor in culturalization is colonialism. A young woman, who founded an association for young women who have been victims of honor-based violence, explains:

There is a hunger for certain kinds of stories. We are often asked to give moving talks, to share our experiences, to touch the audience. We don’t do that, because it becomes a bit like social pornography, you know? That there are a bunch of Swedes in the audience who want these stories. And it's a certain kind of story that they want to hear, that they find believable and touching. Like ‘Look at this poor immigrant girl who is cowed by the mean men in the family’. It becomes a kind of colonial perspective, that they want our stories in order to feel something. (ID6)

The young woman is critical of the culturalist perspective and attributes it to colonialism; it makes her feel like an object to others who use her case to reinforce their own Swedishness.

Gender and age

The general perception that immigrant boys and men do not respect girls and women is related to another persistent stereotype: that only girls are victims of violence. Honor-based violence is certainly defined as patriarchal, and studies reveal that the lack of basic individual and legal rights for girls and women is implicit in such social contexts. Nevertheless, boys also report surveillance and control by their families in sexual matters (cf. Strid et al., 2021). Accordingly, there is a gender stereotype that only girls/women can be victims and only boys/men perpetrators. Quantitative studies have shown that although more girls than boys report having been subjected to violence, girls also report having subjected family members to violence, albeit to a lesser extent than boys (Baianstovu et al., 2019; Strid et al., 2021). One consequence of these gender stereotypes is that boys lack access to support, and another is that victims of women's violence may remain unprotected:

We’ve had cases where a person has been brutally beaten and is in the emergency room. When we get there, the mother is sitting on the edge of the bed, even though it's the mother who committed the abuse. It was thought that women don’t do this. (FG45)

The professional participants also point out that young women who are not considered quiet and submissive, but dress defiantly, drink alcohol, are sexually active and otherwise challenge gender norms, are excluded from the victim position. Altogether, the empirical material reveals that boys, Black women, men, adult women, older people, and LGBTQ people are left unprotected, while young, feminine, and heterosexual girls are protected.

One girl, who reports experiencing severe honor-based violence, is critical of the culturalist discourse. She is grateful for the help she has received and describes herself as “something as unusual as a successful honor case.” During her years in sheltered housing, she saw girl after girl leaving care before their placements had formally ended, because of stereotypical misunderstandings about their victimization and needs. The main reason, she says, is that the other girls were faced with the demand never to see their families again, which they could not bear. She, on the other hand, was never subjected to such a demand: “They just said, ‘Right now it is dangerous for you to see your family, but if you want to later, we’ll support you the best we can.’” (ID6)

After her placement ended, she felt that a civil society organization specializing in addressing honor-based violence wanted to exploit her vulnerability by making her an ambassador for their organization:

They want this personal sob story, who become emotionally aroused by it. It's completely insane that people only want you to be the face of someone who is an exotic survivor, which is what they call you! And brave! They just want me to be like an object. […] And it's so disrespectful, a form of exploitation. It's turning people into tools for evoking emotions. But you don’t want my knowledge, my opinion, or my professionalism, you only want to hear what a victim I am. […] By doing this, they miss out on so much. (ID6)

This interviewee expresses the importance of listening to every individual story, whatever it might contain, in order to capture the variations of intersectional power relations at the micro, meso, and macro levels.

Religion

Religion is another salient stereotype associated with honor-based violence. The empirical material is permeated with stories about cases where men's violence against women in Muslim family contexts is confused with honor-based violence. Among the participants in the in-depth interviews are women who were selected by honor-based violence specialists for the Metropolitan Study, but whose cases, on closer examination, more resemble men's violence against women. One example is a majority Iraqi hijabi woman who married an Iraqi man against her parents’ wishes. He was unworthy of her, they said, because he did not love her (ID29). She was subjected to violence from day one of the marriage. Desperate to defend her choice, she stayed for years, despite being advised to leave by her parents and an Imam she trusted. Her story does not reveal any legitimization of the violence in her family or social network, although conservative and patriarchal norms are strong in the sexual and marital spheres.

Two Muslim women in a focus group discuss what the stereotypes mean to them:

We are told that Muslims have such and such a culture, but in our countries, culture is diverse. Not all Muslims have the same culture. But every time something happens in a family, they think: ‘They’re Muslims, so it's honor.’ But it could just as well be about something else. […] We work all day against honor killings, but it doesn’t matter, we’re seen as violent anyway. (FG19)

These women express hopelessness in the face of the obvious absurdity of the stereotypes, yet they keep on working. Young people subjected to honor-based violence express similar feelings, as will be described below in the section on the overarching consequences of the stereotypes that are identified and analyzed.

Sexuality

LGBTQ people face difficulties in receiving adequate support, a fact expressed by victims as well as social workers in both social services and shelters. Help and support systems are tailored to the needs of young, heterosexual girls, who fit the narrative of the culturalist discourse. NGOs working with LGBTQ people say that they encounter young men whose families have cut ties with them because they violate the honor norms, and that some of them see no other option than to prostitute themselves for food and housing. A social worker at an NGO working with LGBTQ issues describes the situation as follows:

We ask people to turn to the social services, but unfortunately, we know that the treatment can be disastrous, to be honest. I have tried to call around and ask questions: ‘How does it work now at the social offices, is there any experience of caring for LGBTQ people?’ The reactions are like ‘When it comes to honor-based violence, we can only help [heterosexual] women.’ (FG53)

The general experience is that the public systems’ focus on young girls makes them blind towards the exposure of LGBT persons to honor-based violence Organizations that focus on LGBTQ issues point to a problem that they would like to see highlighted, namely that LGBTQ people with Swedish names and backgrounds who experience violence in patriarchal family contexts, suffer from similar pressures as LGBTQ people in honor contexts.

Consequences and challenges of the stereotypes

Taken together, the stereotypes mean that society and social work overlook a wide range of experiences of honor-based violence, which can prevent certain groups of victims from seeking help:

One consequence of the confusion between Islam and honor-based violence is that society, through its professionals, runs the risk of neglecting victimized girls who do not wear the hijab, a social worker explains: ‘Girls who don’t wear the hijab can be subjected to honor-based violence, while girls who do wear the hijab can lead relatively autonomous lives.’ (FG3)

Another consequence is that people who are exposed to violence in their families feel categorized by stereotypical images, regardless of whether their situation fits the definition of honor-based violence. The categorical association with (im)migration, culture and religion is in itself enough to make them feel misunderstood by society:

Unfortunately, the people who talk most about honor in public are the same people who speak disparagingly about one's religion, one's parents and about immigrants in general. […] Young people learn quite quickly that there are people who take advantage of this. (FG32)

In this excerpt, the social worker expresses her perception of children and young people who feel that when their families and Muslim friends are “under attack,” the young people are included in the negative judgments. This makes them feel unwanted by Swedish society. A youth counselor explains: “They know that people think they are violent and backward. So, it's a heavy burden for teenagers to feel so unwanted by society” (FG32). As a result, the stereotypes become an obstacle to those at risk trusting the support institutions. A social worker in an NGO explains how children feel stigmatized by the stereotypes:

I’m part of something that's not as valuable, and of something that is a problem, my whole life is now something that's not Swedish at all. How do I dare to talk about this to my blonde school counselor who will not understand me? (FG56)

A leader of after-school activities tells us about her encounter with a young boy:

It happens that we get worried about young people and ask questions about honor-based violence, or the young people themselves turn to us. We encourage them to contact student health, social services and so on, but few want to. The other day, a guy said, ‘How can I possibly talk about this? We’re Muslims. They already think my parents are monsters.’ (FG7)

This boy expresses that he would rather put up with the violence in his family than the violence he is exposed to as a Muslim. In other words, he prefers the micro-violence of his family to the meso- and macro-level violence of organizations and society as a whole.

Young people who do not want to seek support are frequently mentioned in the qualitative material. They may be young people who in a state of distress told school counselors about their situation but received no support, social workers who informed parents about what a young person told them, leading to severe punishment, or people who sought support, but were subjected to extensive coercive measures they did not want, let alone expect.

Stereotypes affect trust, of course, and hence also the ability of social workers to communicate with parents, as a social worker in social services describes:

I understand that parents can distance themselves when someone calls them idiotic, it's completely incomprehensible and barbaric. In contact with the school and especially with the social services, they’re called that all the time. That makes it tremendously shameful to talk about honor at all. So, our dilemma is that we want to reach out to the parents, but other representatives of Swedish society have already destroyed the possibilities of doing so. (FG13)

The stereotypes contribute to victims feeling intimidated, invisible, mistrusted, rejected, and discriminated against when they seek help and support, and therefore they refrain from seeking help. Furthermore, the stereotypes lead the support systems to fail to recognize violence in social groups that are not associated with honor contexts, even though they have characteristics that resemble such contexts. Thus, the stereotypes are themselves a form of violence at the micro, meso, and macro levels, and contribute to keeping people in violent situations and potentially also to increasing the level of violence.

Social workers’ handling of stereotypes

Many social workers and other professionals express a critical awareness of stereotypes. They stress the importance of being aware of one's own values and positions in intersectional power relations, in order to establish genuine communication with clients:

Those of us who were born and raised in Sweden run the risk of ending up with a top-down perspective. We go in with a superior attitude. If you have not reflected on it, there is a much greater risk of going into a conversation with a hidden agenda, with a desire for the person you are meeting to become a bit more like you. Become more Swedish. And then there will be no genuine conversation. So that's why we focus a lot on working with our own biases, because you have to be aware of where your values come from and the context in which the families live. What do I mean by ‘honor’ and what do they mean by it? (FG2)

This social worker emphasizes the need to be open to clients’ expressions of the matters at stake, which requires the social worker to prioritize complexity over simplification. This is easier said than done, partly because of how the work is framed, which causes frustration:

It's a bit sad to talk about it, the stress and the lack of time, but everyone kind of starts to look after their own, and you don’t have much time. The amount of work has increased everywhere, and so you don’t have time to be creative, to pick up the phone, to collaborate better, to participate in different meetings. Just look at today, one of us tried to (hold a meeting with another unit at the office) because it would have been so amazingly good if they could give their view, but unfortunately, they weren’t there, because there wasn’t time, because you can’t spend time on anything. You just deal with emergencies. (FG2)

This social worker expresses the internationally recognized experience that her own and her clients’ need for deep communication has increased, while their ability to communicate has been hampered by NPM (cf. Baianstovu & Ablett, 2020). When social workers lack the time and tools to communicate with clients, they are unable to hear their individual stories, which opens up the floodgates to stereotypes and insensitive communicative situations that clients perceive as violent. Seeing and managing is time-consuming, while stereotypes offer easy solutions by giving a false sense of certainty in complex situations. Thus, stereotypes offer a fraudulent promise of efficiency and control in complicated assessment situations.

The focus group participants, the professionals, are mostly worried about how the culturalist focus on Islam as the main cause of honor-based violence has increased in Sweden, though some remain unconcerned. In the excerpt below, a middle manager in the social services’ statutory work with children and their families, warns that the fear of discrimination may conceal girls’ vulnerability. It is more important, she says, that we do not allow ourselves to be paralyzed by fear of being discriminatory:

Some groups may be singled out, but we cannot take that into account, that would be reverse racism. Here in Sweden, we have decided that all children should participate in sport, regardless of where their parents come from. So, stereotypes, that's where I definitely say no. […] If we are always supposed to question things and say ‘It's actually not just women!’ or ‘It's actually not just Muslims!’ then you eventually conclude, ‘No, there's no problem with honor, and if you bring it up, you’re a racist.’ Then we Swedes will suddenly be in the corner of shame. I object to that. When you’ve worked this long, you understand it's not about stereotypes, but this is what reality actually looks like. (FG8)

The manager's concern is deeply felt, as she believes that the professionals’ fear of being perceived as racist negatively affects their ability to deal with honor-based violence, which, in turn, reduces their ability to support girls at risk. In the excerpt below, the social worker further clarifies the especially deep and pervasive stereotypes of Muslims in the culturalist perspective. From this point of view, honor-based violence is considered intrinsic to Islam:

Of course, there is a connection between honor-based violence and the hijab. In my experience, it is increasing all the time. You know, when toddlers are fully covered, it makes me very anxious indeed. I see with my own eyes that the hijab and the oppression of women in the streets is increasing. (FG8)

Both of the above excerpts express the core of the culturalist perspective, which is generally seen as problematic by the focus group participants, who were professionals because its dominance puts pressure on social workers that contradicts their professional experience. Although the polarization between honor-based violence as a lived reality and a stereotypical image of immigrants pervades the empirical material, social workers strive to make their own professional assessments in order to meet clients’ different needs. However, they are constrained by limited access to diverse interventions tailored to their clients’ specific intersectional needs.

Social workers engaged in more open forms of social work, such as in schools and leisure activities, acknowledge that clients do tell them about the complex violence they experience at the micro, meso, and macro levels. We see that stereotypes are prevalent, but also that there are ways to overcome them.

Mitigating the problem

We argue that an intersectional perspective is a reasonable way forward to mitigate the problems that social workers face. Thus, we understand honor-based violence as gendered, intersectional violence within historically and currently segregated groups, and as positioned in the tension between social workers’ recognition of various forms and contexts of violence and the risk of stereotypes inspired by culturalization leading to discrimination.

We have raised the question of how social workers can make violence in minority groups visible and offer support without stigmatizing the groups and without contributing to racism and discrimination. The answer is to rethink honor-based violence and frame it as a gendered and intersectional form of violence. This can be done by paying attention to the interacting lines of power at micro, meso, and macro levels in each individual's life, and how categories such as age, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, function, sexuality, and sexual expression interact at and within these levels. The application of intersectionality in social work practice illuminates the potential impact of multiple power relations and inequalities that are simultaneously at play. Accordingly, an intersectional perspective makes visible the intersections in the empirical material between mutually shaping inequalities such as nation, ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, religion, migration, and culture.

Despite the public and highly polarized debates, and in line with the role of social workers to improve their clients’ well-being, social workers need to recognize the intersecting causes and manifestations of honor-based violence. They need to recognize the complexity of age, sex, gender, and victim and perpetrator roles, for which an intersectional understanding of multiple, interacting power relations is of great importance. In line with previous research, it is clear that social workers do not have enough time to do this. Nevertheless, time and extensive personal in-depth communication with each individual who is exposed to violence in the family is the only way to address the complex challenges social workers face in dealing with honor-based violence as a lived reality while simultaneously exposing, revealing and dismantling persistent stereotypes. In doing so, social work can become the emancipatory and antioppressive agent that contemporary society needs.

Limitations of the study

The study is limited in its aims and scope. For example, it does not explore how honor ties themselves may serve to protect family members within their cultural group and build bridges to others in their new setting. Nor does it comment on any other characteristics of cultures of honor than violence. Furthermore, the analysis explores experiences and understandings of honor-based violence, but does not explore the socioeconomic mechanisms of the honor-centered norms that underpin the violence, which thus are in need of further research.

Conclusions: Implications for social work

Overall, we have provided an analysis of honor-based violence as both a lived reality and a stereotype, and in so doing have outlined what is needed to improve social workers’ capacity to handle complex cases involving honor-based violence without engaging in racism, culturalization or discrimination.

At the micro level, honor-based violence is violence between individuals in families, and at the meso and macro levels it is violence against groups by organizations and society as a whole. Violence at the meso and macro levels is a manifestation of boundaries and communicative barriers shaped by culturalist conceptions of nation, ethnicity, race, gender, age, sexuality, religion, and migration (cf. Baianstovu, 2017; Strid et al., 2021).

The culturalizing understanding of honor-based violence is violent in several ways: it misunderstands people's vulnerability; it misinforms social workers, causing them to overlook forms of violence related to age, religion, gender, nation, race, and so on; and it causes clients to distrust and withdraw from society and its support systems.

The argument developed here is that it is necessary to recognize the interconnectedness of honor-based violence as a lived reality and as a stereotype, of mutually shaping inequalities, and of differently positioned forms of (honor-based) violence. The findings show that honor-based violence as a lived reality and as a stereotype are linked in everyday life, and that the stereotypes contribute to trapping individuals in violent life situations where those who are supposed to be helping them exhibit prejudices that trigger their fear of discrimination. Furthermore, stereotypes contribute to segregation, which perpetuates and deepens the norms that legitimize honor-based violence. Thus, a racist stereotype contributes to reinforcing family violence and accordingly is a form of violence itself.

The stereotypes are rooted in culturalist perspectives on honor-based violence, while criticism of the act of stereotyping is rooted in an intersectional, power-sensitive perspective. In the latter perspective, diversity based on gender, age, race and religion are all considered simultaneously.

The results also show that polarization is an obstacle to social workers’ ability to support those exposed to violence. In combination with what previous research tells us about scarce resources, distorted knowledge, and tiny learning opportunities in working with clients, mistrust is inevitable, and the help and support clients need can neither be given, nor received.

Intersectionality is about recognizing the complexity and diversity of people's life situations and how various orders of power interact at the micro, meso, and macro levels. We understand honor-based violence as violence at the micro level in the immediate and extended family, violence at the meso level, when professionals stereotype people with immigrant backgrounds and either misperceive violence or fail to recognize it because it is understood as “cultural” and therefore “natural”, and violence at the macro level, which is due to the persistent culturalist discourse that informs politics and legislation, a topic we have not yet explored. We have shown that exposure to what we understand as honor-based violence increases the risk of victims being exposed to violence on all of these levels.

Our conclusions raise new research problems that need to be studied to deliver concrete tools for social policy, community-based social work and inquiry, counseling, and protection efforts:

The affinities and differences between honor-centered norms and other patriarchal norms in segregated groups.

The conditions under which honor norms arise, persist and/or transform.

How honor-based violence can be prevented at universal, selected and indicated levels.

The influence of the discourse of culturalization on policy and legislation.