The aim of the study was to investigate the social service's approach and handling of cases related to honor-related violence and oppression. Furthermore, we wanted to map the boundary the social service makes between honor-related violence and oppression and violence in close relationships.

In order to provide a detailed analysis of the aspects and questions that shall follow, a qualitative thematic analysis method has been used by conducting four semi-structured interviews with social secretaries from a social office in Sweden. The results showed that social secretaries define and manage honor-related violence and oppression in different ways. There is also no clear boundary between the phenomena, however, there are certain factors / motives in the respondents' responses that are of great importance to the social workers when they define honor-related violence and oppression.

Some common underlying factors / motives are the collective or the nuclear family, culture or sexuality. It was also found that respondents often associate problems of honor with people of foreign origin. Another interesting observation worth highlighting was that several of the respondents did not really have any direct action plan or special guidelines to follow. In addition, the interviews showed that the most common intervention is family therapy and thus it is the first intervention offered.