Honour culture and women's rights

The largest Swedish surveys (City of Stockholm 2018 & 2024, Gothenburg 2017, Uppsala 2018) consistently show that 10–20% of girls in lower secondary school in the studied areas live under clear honour norms: conditional virginity demands, bans on having a boyfriend, controlled leisure activities and threats when norms are broken. The National Competence Team estimates that up to 240,000 young people in Sweden live under some form of honour-related control.

Brå's 2022:7 report documents that honour motives appear in a clear subset of the lethal violence affecting young women in Sweden. Fadime Şahindal (2002), Pela Atroshi (1999) and Maria Barin Aydin (2023) are the best-known cases, but Brå notes that honour violence is systematically underreported because it usually takes place within the family.

These are not isolated incidents. This is a system of control imported from the countries of origin, one Sweden has long been unwilling to face.

The Schools Inspectorate and the National Agency for Education have repeatedly reported on situations where girls are not allowed to take part in swimming lessons, sex education or physical education. Residential segregation, religiously controlled independent schools and informal gender-segregated activities have been documented in several vulnerable areas.

Sweden introduced the offence of "honour oppression" only in 2022 (Penal Code ch. 4 § 4 e) and an aggravating sentencing ground for honour motives in 2020 — decades after the phenomenon began to be documented. The number of reported honour offences doubled in the first year the law was in force, which Brå interprets as a sign of previous underreporting rather than an actual increase.