Offer eller förövare? En kvalitativ studie om yrkesverksamma socialarbetares syn på unga mäns situation inom hedersproblematik.

Abstract Title: Victims or perpetrators – a qualitative study on professional social worker’s perception of young men’s situation in an honour context. This qualitative study is based on seven semi-structured interviews with professionals who encounter honour related issues in their work. The focus of the interviews and this study is the young men and their situation. Our intention was to see how these professionals perceive the young men they meet and how they describe their situation in patriarchal families. The task to control and sometimes punish young women in the family falls on the young men and they do not really have an opportunity to question this. If they do, they can become victims of the same treatment as the women have to endure. Our view is that the media focuses almost exclusively on the affected women and how they are victims for an oppressive system. When the general debate mentions young men it is often as the role of the perpetrator. Should we ask ourselves if these young men should be seen as victims as well? With this study we want to highlight this issue. Our results reveal that social workers and school counsellors meet more girls in the honour context and that one reason for that is that the boys are overlooked. Some professionals have trouble seeing boys as victims of honour related issues, partly because they are not open with the fact that this is what they need help with. The effect of the boys not seeking help for honour related issues is that there is not any good recourse for helping them. Our informants feel that these boys are confused since they live with one foot in their family’s culture and one as a normal Swedish teenager. Despite this confusion the informants experience that this has become normal and that the boys accept that it is the way it has to be. The ideal victim is not someone that feels like a victim or in fact is one, instead it is the one that the society points out as a victim. There are six criteria’s a person or group needs to fill to become ideal and the author points out the difficulty for men to fulfil these. This perhaps, contributes to the fact that professionals have trouble seeing young men they meet as victims of honour violence. The society uses the media to separate what is good and what is bad and this is difficult to do when the line between predator and victim is diffuse. This could be the reason why the young men are seen as no more than a predator