”Män har heder kvinnor har skam” - Om kriminalisering som åtgärd för att förebygga hedersrelaterat våld

Sammanfattning: Honor-based violence is not a foreign phenomenon in Sweden. Still, there are significant difficulties in understanding it. This is partly due to the lack of a recognized definition and to conflicting opinions regarding how the violence can be explained. Nevertheless, what is common to the various explanations is that the violence stems from the idea of man being superior to woman. In Sweden, crimes committed in the name of honor are not covered by any classification of crime. For this reason, the purpose of the thesis is to examine whether or not honor-based violence should be criminalized. Different theories regarding the intentions of penal law are being examined and in particular theories of general prevention. Within general prevention, the conception of legislation’s normative effects and its ability to change people’s behavior are found. Thus, a law is considered a mean to suppress unwanted conducts. The legislation’s normative effects are problematized by adopting the perspective of the sociology of law. Thomas Mathiesen’s theory about intended and unintended consequences of legislation is presented. Mathiesen stresses that the explicit purpose of legislation is neither Always redeemed, nor unlikely to result in unintended consequences. To examine the potential effects of criminalizing honor-based violence, a number of different explanatory models are employed to gain several points of view. Although legislation is shown to have normative effects, it is clear that those effects are insufficient in terms of criminalizing unwanted conducts. It is also clear that one precondition, when examining legislation’s intended and unintended consequences, is to adopt an intersectional perspective. The analysis shows that it is not, within the limits of this essay, possible to give a sole answer to the question if honor-based violence should be criminalized.