Ghetto legislation as state violence – an analysis of Danish policies criminalising vulnerable housing areas

• In Event: State and Political Crime

Abstract

This paper discusses the implementation of laws targeted at vulnerable housing areas in Denmark. Since 2010, successive governments have had a publicly formulated policy of introducing measures for socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods, which these governments have also consistently called 'ghettos'. A so-called 'ghetto list' of these areas is published annually. Several 'ghetto packages' have been adopted during this period (2010 and 2018), which have introduced shifting terminologies and criteria for when an area is a ghetto. In the Danish government's whitepaper 2018, a ghetto area is defined as a public housing area with at least 1,000 residents, where the proportion of immigrants and descendants from non- Western countries exceeds 50 per cent, coupled with other criteria. Increasingly intrusive measures have been adopted to reduce the number of ghetto areas, and to increase ‘integration’, including forced movement, double penalty for a range of crimes within the ghetto zone, forced public day care for children from the age of one, just to mention a few.
Combining the concepts state and legal violence, I analyse how Danish ghetto laws function as the manifestation of an explicit, symbolic politics of exclusion, and at the same time as objectivised, neutral legislation. As state violence, they operate at a discursive and symbolic level through state-mandated exclusionary policies and practices against migrants, signalling a hierarchy of social worth. The implementation of ghetto laws, for its part, puts into practice structural inequalities and discrimination. This lens allows us to capture the effects of law by focusing on different kinds of economic, psychological and social harm, such as loss of income, displacement, anxiety and diminished self-esteem; and social stigmatisation, exclusion, and imprisonment.

Author

• Louise Victoria Johansen, University of Copenhagen