Honor Related Violence and Oppression : A Study that Touches on Social Workers’ Obstacles in Honor-Related Matters and Initiatives for Honor-Vulnerable Individuals in Sweden

The term “Honor related violence and oppression” is quite difficult to define, mainly because it is a concept that can be seen through many perspectives and also expressed in many forms, such as, violence, control but also murder. In the most recent years in Sweden, the amount of honor related crimes have risen as it has been gaining a lot of attention from the media. The result of this has made the government and the social services in Sweden invest their efforts in trying to combat and reduce the honor culture. Therefore, the purpose of this study is mainly to identify the difficulties and interventions in the work against honor culture. As the topic is wide and talked about in many countries, the search for literature had to be of quality, therefore we have mainly used scientific articles which we have analyzed and read through databases such as SwePub and Libsearch to study this phenomenon. After reviewing our chosen literature we put our analysis of the material to answer our question. Many of the workers and actors lack the certainty on how to act when dealing with such problems. This has resulted to affect the cooperation between the actors in their work against the honor culture. If the actors involved had a common approach or common definition of the problem, the cooperation would have improved along with the work in helping and being a resource towards the victims of the honor related violence and oppression. Although, it is a difficult level to reach since there are both advantages and disadvantages. But the common understanding would have been beneficial in the work as the uncertainty within the workers would have been reduced in relation to the problem. This will, though, turn out to be a difficult achievement because there are some explanations and approaches to the problem that have precedence, while some explanations and approaches are excluded.