Constructing Honor-Based Violence in Swedish Courts: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis

Sammanfattning

Honor is not formally defined as a legal category in Swedish law, yet it is invoked in court reasoning as both a motive and an aggravating circumstance. In recent years, legal measures have been introduced in Sweden to identify and address honor-based violence (HBV), and since 1 July 2020, increased penalties of crimes committed with an honor motive. At the same time, concerns have been raised that limited knowledge of honor, or reliance on stereotypical understandings, may lead to simplified interpretations in which honor motives are either over-attributed or overlooked. This raises questions regarding how HBV is interpreted and operationalized within the legal system. Therefore, this thesis aims to examine how discourses of HBV appear in Swedish murder cases involving claims of honor-related motives, and how these are expressed through legal reasoning. The study explores how honor is constructed and justified by legal actors, including judges, prosecutors, and expert witnesses, and analyzes the tensions and interpretive frameworks through which honor is understood in court judgments. Methodologically, the study employs a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) and is based on an analysis of ten Swedish murder cases in which honor-related motives were invoked. FCDA functions as the overarching theoretical framework, while performative gender and intersectionality are used as analytical tools. The findings reveal recurring discursive patterns in which honor is framed as a gendered, culturalized, and migration-related phenomenon. A cultural discourse emerges dominant in court reasoning, with a secondary feminist discourse. As a result, patriarchal power relations are frequently constructed through culturalized interpretive frameworks. The analysis further shows how responsibility and victimhood are negotiated through patterns of victim blaming and perpetrator mitigation. Overall, the findings show that legal actors construct honor through culturally gendered interpretive frameworks in Swedish court reasoning on honor motives.