The Liberal Party will investigate the possibility of banning marriage between cousins in Sweden to tackle honour culture.
Swedish Liberal Party Secretary Juno Blom stated that marriage between cousins is a part of honour culture and hopes that the party will support banning the practice at a national meeting later in the year.
“We know that when it comes to cousin marriage, children have often been promised away early. They are then married off, and we also know that the vulnerability risks becoming so much greater when there are two families planning and executing these marriages,” Blom told SVT.
The broadcaster notes that while marriage between immediate family members is illegal in Sweden, there can be exemptions for half-siblings. There are no regulations at all on first-cousins marrying each other.
When asked how many honour culture-related cousin marriages were forced, Ms Blom said there were no official figures but claimed to have met countless young people who have said they were married to cousins against their will.
“[The ban] is a way to prevent and stop young people from being forced into marriage. Young people should be allowed the freedom to choose,” Blom said.
Honour culture remains a major issue for many young people in Sweden, with a 2017 report claiming that 240,000 young people with migration backgrounds lived under the rules of honour culture, which includes being told who to marry and the threat of violence to those who refuse to obey.
“Our assumption is that every third student, girls and boys, who themselves were born abroad or has both parents born abroad live in honour family norms,” Astrid Schlytter, associate professor at Stockholm University, said in 2017.
In March, it was revealed that Sweden saw nearly 1,000 reports of crimes relating to honour culture in 2020. The report is the first full year of statistics on the subjects since police began recording honour-motivated crime in the autumn of 2019.