Honour-based oppression

The prevalence of honour-based violence and oppression in Sweden has become increasingly visible and received greater attention in recent years. Among other things, a survey of young people in the three major cities has shown that more than ten per cent of the girls who responded were expected to remain virgins until they married, and almost as many stated that they were living with honour-based violence.

Honour-based violence and oppression has been a specific policy area since 2007 and, as of September 2025, preventing and combating honour-based violence is the seventh gender equality goal. 1 A range of measures has been taken by society to address these issues. Among other things, the county administrative boards are now tasked with providing ongoing support for initiatives aimed at preventing honour-based violence and oppression. Over the years, resources have been allocated to provide various professional groups, such as social workers and police officers, basic and more advanced training in honour-based violence and oppression, and a number of acts falling within the scope of honour-based oppression have been criminalised. In 2026, the Government launched a special initiative to develop measures to combat honour-based violence and oppression, allocating just over SEK 130 million in the budget for this purpose.

A new offence: Honour-based oppression

As part of efforts to prevent and combat honour-based violence and oppression, new grounds for imposing a harsher sentence were introduced on 1 July 2020 in Chapter 29, Section 2(10) of the Swedish Criminal Code, targeting honour-motivated crime. This states that an honour motive – i.e. a motive to preserve or restore the honour of a person or of an immediate or wider family or some other similar group – constitutes an aggravating circumstance that may lead to a harsher sentence for an offence. However, shortly thereafter, the Government concluded that this provision was not sufficient to clearly convey the message that society does not condone honour-based violence and oppression. In light of this and to achieve more comprehensive and effective legislation that reflects the serious nature of the problem, a new offence known as “honour-based oppression” (Chapter 4, Section 4e of the Criminal Code) was introduced on 1 June 2022.

The new offence is structured and worded in the same way as offences related to violation of integrity, with the addition of the requirement that the perpetrator must have had an honour motive. The acts must constitute repeated offences forming part of a systematic violation of the person’s integrity, and the acts must have been intended to seriously damage the person’s self-esteem.2 Studies of how the courts apply the provision on offences related to violation of integrity show that the vast majority of convictions relate to at least two, and usually three, instances of assault. It is rare for a person to be convicted when the charge does not include assault, only repeated instances of unlawful threats coupled with other less serious offences.

The provision on honour-based oppression is worded as follows:
Any person who commits or otherwise contributes to either of the following against another person

1. criminal acts under Chapter 3 or 4; Chapter 5, Section 1 or 2, Chapter 6 or 12 or under Section 24 of the Restraining Orders Act (1988:688), or
2. acts constituting a punishable attempt, punishable preparation or conspiracy to commit an offence under item 1
   

shall be found guilty of honour-based oppression if a motive has been to preserve or restore the honour of a person or of an immediate or wider family or some other similar group, each of the acts has formed part of a systematic violation of the person’s integrity and the acts have been intended to seriously damage the person’s self-esteem. The penalty for such an offence is imprisonment for a minimum of one and a maximum of six years.

The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) has been tasked with evaluating how well the application of the new criminal provision is working, and this report concludes that assignment.

As input for the study, we primarily reviewed all 141 police reports concerning honour-based oppression and the associated preliminary investigations into honour-based oppression up to and including the turn of the year 2024/2025. When a police report is filed, the police almost always open a case, and it is this term that we use in the report.

We also reviewed all 87 court rulings up to the turn of the year 2025/26, in which we identified that the prosecutor had sought a harsher sentence with the honour motive as the grounds. Finally, we gathered views from various actors on both the provision and the needs of victims. This was done partly through surveys of prosecutors and regional resource centres for measures against honour-based violence and oppression, and partly through a group interview with police officers.

In summary, it can be said that there have been significant problems in the application of the law, which raises questions as to whether it has truly contributed to improving the situation for those subjected to honour-based violence and oppression.

Low number of reports

According to crime statistics, a total of 254 offences relating to honour-based oppression were reported during the first three and a half years after the provision came into force, i.e. from 1 June 2022 up to and including 2025. In relation to studies conducted on how common it is for young people in Sweden to have been subjected to honour-based violence and oppression, this can be viewed as a small number of reports. Thus, the number of unreported cases is high, which may have several explanations: that those subjected to honour-based oppression may not be aware of the new criminal provision, that they are aware of it but are afraid or unwilling to report it to the police, or that the police may fail to recognise that there is an honour-based motive behind a reported crime.

Two types of cases

Cases involving honour-based oppression typically concern two types of situations. The first type, which is the most common, involves a teenage girl 4 who is subjected to honour-based oppression by her family (referred to as “family cases”). The second type involves a woman who is subjected to honour-based oppression by her partner.

Family cases

In almost 90 per cent of family cases, one or both parents are suspected of being the perpetrators. In almost a third of cases, the victim’s brother or brothers are also suspected of committing honour-based oppression.

In cases where information is available regarding the parents’ country of birth, they are most commonly born in Syria, followed by Iraq and Afghanistan. In most cases, the victim contacts the police themself and files a report. However, in one-fifth of cases, the victim first tells someone at school about their situation, and it is just as common for them to tell someone at social services, who then files a report.

Around a third of reports contain details of repeated assault, but only ten per cent of all reports include the victim describing several specific instances of abuse, complete with dates. What prompts the reporting of honour-based oppression is therefore not primarily that the victim is subjected to physical violence, but rather a situation in which they are strictly controlled by their parents and subjected to extensive restrictions on their freedom in a manner that is not age-appropriate. In most cases, this involves norms relating to female sexuality in a broad sense, such as restrictions on clothing, make-up and socialising with boys or men. The picture often also includes strict rules regarding spending time with friends after school and the monitoring of mobile phones and social media. Many of the girls and women who are victims say that the strict control over their socialising and clothing began when they reached puberty.

It is clear from the investigations that social services take allegations of children being subjected to honour-based oppression seriously. In over 80 per cent of cases where the victim is under the age of 18, social services have taken the child into care following the report and placed them in a family (foster) home. The most common scenario is that the placement is made compulsorily under the LVU; 5 this is the case in nearly two out of three placements of children. In other cases, the placement is made under the SoL,6 6which means that the parents accept the decision to take the child into care.

When the victim is aged 18 or older, it is not as common for them to – with the assistance of social services – move away from home after filing a police report. This has occurred in 40 per cent of the cases. In such instances, the move less often involves placement in a family (foster) home and more often in some other form of sheltered housing.

Honour-based oppression against a partner

In the second type of case, where a woman reports her partner for honour-based oppression, the police report is usually made when the couple is separating or has already separated, and the honour-based control is linked to a family norm that divorce is forbidden. The man’s suspicions of cheating or his hurt feelings because the woman wants to leave or has left him have led to threats, defamation and assault. His reactions are exacerbated by an honour-based context, in which the man and his relatives believe that the woman has damaged the man’s and the family’s reputation through her behaviour.

As with the family cases, many of the reports do not include any information from the woman stating that she was assaulted. In only one of the 38 cases reported does the victim describe several specific occasions on which she was physically abused. What she often describes instead is that she has been subjected to unlawful threats, but this may also apply to other types of offences. These are then of the same or lower severity than unlawful threats, such as molestation, defamation and unlawful breach of privacy.

Very few police reports lead to prosecution

Of the 141 cases of honour-based oppression included in Brå’s sample, only six led to prosecution for honour-based oppression. Four of these concerned family cases, and two involved honour-based oppression against a partner.
There are essentially three factors that explain why so few investigations into honour-based oppression lead to prosecution. The first is that a large proportion of the reports do not appear to meet the objective criteria for honour-based oppression, i.e. they do not involve repeated offences that “formed part of a systematic violation of the person’s integrity and the acts have been intended to seriously damage the person’s self-esteem”. The second is that the victims often do not wish to participate in the investigation and, after a while, withdraw their accusations. The third is that the evidence that emerges is often not strong enough to support an indictment.

As regards the first factor, almost none of the police reports contain repeated, specific offences of the severity that prosecutors and courts usually consider necessary to convict someone of honour-based oppression (see previous section).One question is then why what is reported is nevertheless registered as honour-based oppression. One reason may be that they are allowing for the possibility that further offences may come to light during the course of the investigation, or that they may be able to seek a harsher sentence for the individual offences in the report due to the honour motive.

As regards the second factor, the preliminary investigations reveal that nearly half of the victims withdraw their allegations. This illustrates the difficult situation many of them find themselves in after reporting to the police that they have been subjected to honour-based oppression by their family. A common reason among young victims who have been placed in a family (foster) home after filing a report is that they feel lonely and miss their family. They then choose to retract their statements so they can be allowed to return home, even though there is no certainty that the situation within the family has changed. However, there may also be implicit threats from family and relatives that cause the victim to no longer wish to participate in the preliminary investigation.

The relatively few cases that remain to be pursued are then usually dropped due to lack of evidence. Despite extensive investigative efforts by the police, primarily interviews, there is rarely sufficient evidence of what happened. The victim has often not told anyone outside the family about their situation, and no one in the family usually wants to testify about what happened.

Of the six cases that went to trial, three resulted in a conviction for honour-based oppression.

Half of prosecutors believe that filing a police report makes the victim’s situation worse

A survey was sent out to all prosecutors who have worked on an investigation into honour-based oppression. A majority of them replied that the new provision may have had a positive effect, even though it has not been applied very often. They felt that it sends an important message that society deems honour-based violence and oppression unacceptable. At the same time, three out of four did not believe that a police investigation improved the situation for the victims, and nearly half believed that the investigation made the victim's situation worse.

When asked whether there was anything in the investigative process that could be improved so that more cases led to prosecution, the most common response was that the work of securing evidence needed to be improved. It is particularly important to conduct the investigation swiftly, so that the victim does not have time to back out before they have been interviewed and the suspects do not have the opportunity to destroy evidence.

Application of the grounds for imposing a harsher sentence

The criticism that the consultative bodies levelled at the proposal for a new criminal provision on honour-based oppression was that “honour motive” was too vague a concept to be included in a description of an offence. As so few cases of honour-based oppression have resulted in prosecution, the number of court rulings is too small to provide a reliable picture of the interpretative problems faced by the courts in cases concerning honour-based oppression. For this reason, Brå also reviewed court rulings in which the prosecutor sought a harsher sentence on the grounds that the perpetrator had an honour motive.

The review shows that when prosecutors seek a harsher sentence on the grounds of an honour motive, there is usually strong evidence for the alleged offence; only seven per cent of the verdicts were acquittals. However, it was only in half of the verdicts that the court ruled that there was sufficient evidence of an honour motive and applied the grounds for imposing a harsher sentence. This shows that it can be difficult for the courts to understand what is meant by “honour” in this context. Views on this may differ both between prosecutors and courts and between different courts. The interpretation problems that emerge from a review of the court rulings include whether the control that the parents exercised over their teenage daughters lies clearly outside what can be regarded as normal in Sweden, particularly in cases where the girl or woman goes to great lengths in her rebellion against family norms by staying out late at night, using drugs and so on. Another area of uncertainty is the extent to which the extended family needs to be involved for an honour motive to be considered to exist. A third area of uncertainty may arise in the case of crimes committed by a partner in connection with a divorce, concerning how to determine whether the perpetrator was driven by jealousy and hurt feelings or by a desire to uphold honour.

What is needed to improve the situation of those affected?

The regional coordinators who responded to the Brå survey also generally felt that a police investigation does not help to improve the victim’s situation. They instead highlighted the following as key elements in the work to combat honour-based violence and oppression:

• Victims must be able to receive long-term, personalised support that takes into account the feelings of loneliness and ambivalence associated with the process of change. This requires a wide range of social services that meet victims’ needs for both protection and quality of life.
• Social services and other relevant authorities must work not only with those who are victimised, but also with those who perpetrate the oppression. This involves both general measures, such as raising awareness of the laws that apply in Sweden, and targeted measures aimed at, for example, parents who uphold honour-based norms.
• There is also a need for broader, long-term social work to address the factors that can contribute to honour-based norms being upheld and defended. These include factors such as segregation, unemployment, poverty and racism.