Kulturella slag : En diskursanalys av kulturens betydelse för konstruktioner av olika typer av våld

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to analyze legal texts under the law with special provisions for the care of children, to create a deeper understanding of, and if so, how social workers in the Swedish social services and courts construct different discourses on culture and violence. Compulsory care of children according to the law mentioned above is one of the biggest intervention the Swedish state has the authority to do against individuals. Swedish courts decide whether the child should be taken into care based on the social services investigation. The empirical data for the study is eight legal texts, where the child was abused by the legal guardian, which have been studied through discourse analysis. Discourse focuses on how people through language construct and reconstruct perceptions of the reality. The focus of the analysis was to find constructions of subject positions, categories and relations. The results of the analysis showed that the selected legal texts constructs stereotypical ideas about “honour culture” and gives culture a great explanatory value to the violence practiced by people assigned the “honour culture”. The “Swedish culture” on the contrary, was made invisible and was given no explanatory value to the violence. Instead the violence was given social and individual explanations. The selected legal documents had a tendency to construct perceptions of “honour culture” and honour related violence in a stereotypical and homogeneous way.