Dagerlind: Children Are People – Not Tools for Family Honor

OP-ED • When the leader of the Nyans Party, Mikael Yüksel, downplays honor-based oppression by equating it with celebrating Christmas and Easter, a crucial boundary is blurred: the one between tradition and coercion, between upbringing and oppression. At the heart of the debate is not religion – but children’s right to be individuals in a free society.

Mikael Yüksel, leader of the Nyans Party, claims in a post that raising children according to “Muslim culture” is not honor-based oppression, and compares this to how Christians in Sweden pass on their traditions. In an accompanying clip, he suggests that Moderate Party voters should ask themselves whether they too are honor-based oppressors when they celebrate Christmas, Easter, or allow their children to take part in Christian-tinged holidays.

Det är inte hedersförtryck att uppfostra sitt barn enligt sin religion och kultur. Muslimer har rätt att uppfostra sina barn enligt muslimsk kultur, på samma sätt som kristna har rätt att uppfostra sina barn enligt kristen kultur. Politiker ska inte definiera vad hedersförtryck… pic.twitter.com/OhL3r8RPEe

— Mikail Yüksel ???????? (@MikailPNyuksel) December 19, 2025

But here the argument already falls apart. Passing on celebrations, stories, and symbols is not the same as subjecting the whole life of a child to a collective concept of honor, where shame, control, threats, and sometimes violence – even lethal – are used to uphold the family’s or clan’s reputation.

What Honor-Based Oppression Actually Is

Honor-based oppression isn’t about food, holidays, or politeness. It’s about systematic control over children’s – particularly girls’ – choices in life. Who they may associate with, how they may dress, whom they may love, and ultimately whether they even have the right to choose their own lives.

Equating this with Swedish children celebrating Christmas or Midsummer is not only intellectually dishonest – it trivializes a very serious form of oppression that the state has a duty to combat.

The Child’s Rights Come Before Religion

In Sweden, we raise children with the child’s best interests as the overriding principle. It is not the child’s duty to bear the family’s honor, cultural prestige, or religious purity. Children are not symbols. They are individuals.

That is why it goes without saying that children growing up in Sweden should have the same freedom as their peers – regardless of their parents’ origins. They should be equipped for life in a secular, democratic society, not for a parallel society where norms are borrowed from clan structures in Mogadishu or Kabul.

Christianity and Islam – Not Comparable in Swedish Context

Yüksel speaks as if Christianity and Islam were two equivalent systems with the same relationship to Swedish society. They are not.

Christianity in Sweden has for centuries been reformed, secularized, and adapted to the Enlightenment, democracy, and human rights. It no longer dominates politics, legislation, or family life. Fundamentalist Christian upbringing exists today only in small sects on the utmost margins of society.

In the Muslim world, the situation is the opposite, with those who are culturally Muslim as a small minority and what we by Western standards would call fundamentalists being the majority. In large parts of this world, Islam remains unreformed.

The Enlightenment, secularism, and democracy have a weak or non-existent position relative to ideas of theocracy and caliphate. Religion is often intertwined with politics, law, and social control. To point out that Islam today is in all essentials the same as Islam in the 7th century is not Islamophobia – it is simply a statement of reality.

Freedom of Religion – Also Freedom from Religion

Freedom of religion also entails a negative right. The right not to be subjected to religion. That right, of course, also applies to children as a protection from religious parental coercion.

It becomes deeply inconsistent when adult religious representatives invoke positive religious freedom for themselves – but deny negative religious freedom for their children and in the name of Islam instead demand the right to force them into a life that belongs neither to the Western world nor the 21st century.

In a secular society, religion can be practiced privately. It has no given right to dominate the public sphere, schools, or children’s upbringing. This is especially true for newcomers like Islam, which unlike Christianity and pre-Christian beliefs has no historical or traditional roots in Sweden.

The Social Contract Applies to Everyone

Those who move to Sweden cannot be allowed to do so simply in order to unconditionally access Swedish welfare. One also enters into a social contract with obligations and responsibilities such as learning the language, transitioning from benefit-dependence to self-sufficiency, and adhering to the law. One of the most important things is also to respect fundamental civil freedoms and rights, especially when it comes to children.

If a conflict arises between Islam and these freedoms and rights, then it is Islam that must give way – always. Insisting on the right to raise children according to medieval superstitious norms that violate the Convention on the Rights of the Child breaks this contract.

This contract applies in all areas. Islam can be said to have only a temporary residence permit in Sweden. If one cannot remain here without accepting satire and criticism, without resorting to violence, terror, and Quran riots, without spreading hatred against Jews, hatred against homosexuals, and misogyny, without obstructing work, schools, and healthcare, and without subjecting one’s children to honor oppression – and all of this has so far failed catastrophically – then that permit may cease to apply and both Islam as such and its practitioners should seek somewhere else.

An Essentially Simple Issue

Yüksel’s rhetoric aims to relativize and shift the focus. But the question is actually quite simple. Should children in Sweden be free individuals – or bearers of family honor?

It is not honor-based oppression to celebrate Christmas. It is honor-based oppression to, with guilt, shame, threats, and violence, deprive children of their future.

Children are people.
Not tools.