The social construction of parallel society in Swedish police documents

Abstract

‘Parallel society’ is a term with clear negative connotations, often used as self-evident without further need for explanation. In Northern Europe, the term has been used to describe a danger scenario – an unwillingness to integrate, a growing risk of disintegrated society, crime, ethnic enclaves and Islamic fundamentalism – and it has provided journalists, police and politicians with a ‘scientific’ term to forward anti-migration and anti-multiculturalism discourses. The term ‘parallel society’ (parallellsamhällen) is new to Sweden, but has lately been increasingly used in reports from the police, where it is framed as a force on its way to take over core societal structures in socio-economically vulnerable areas, such as criminal and private law, banking, housing and labour markets. The ambition of this chapter is to examine the content of the term ‘parallel society’ as it is used in reports from the police, and scrutinise this use considering notions of a punitive turn and the practice of categorisation of population groups in Swedish criminal policy and practice. By drawing on examples of a recent police operation in Sweden and the Danish ‘parallel society law’, I argue that the parallel society discourse might have consequences in terms of police work, by affecting how the police understand and thus act upon social problems and social phenomena, and that this is driven by categorising some population groups as the foreign ‘other’. By transforming social phenomena and problems into police questions, they are translated and understood as criminal problems, as are the population groups connected to the phenomena.