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| Stefan Löfven, Sweden’s prime minister. Photograph: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images |
This
cover-up of sex assaults in Sweden is a gift for xenophobes
Andrew Brown
Wednesday 13 January
2016 12.47 GMT
Police
failure to report widespread assaults by immigrant gangs at a
Stockholm music festival will be immensely damaging for the country’s
race relations
The news that the
Swedish authorities covered up widespread sexual assaults by
immigrant gangs on teenage girls at a Stockholm music festival, and
possibly other incidents too, is immensely damaging for race
relations in Sweden because it conforms so precisely to two
stereotypes.
The first, widely
believed in nationalist circles, is that immigrants to Sweden are
responsible for the huge rise in reported rapes in recent years. The
second, more true, and much more widely believed, is that you cannot
trust respectable Swedish opinion to be honest about the bad effects
of immigration.
It has been quite
clearly established that there has been an increase in violent crime,
and in reported rape, over the last 40 years in Sweden. In 1995, the
first year for which statistics are easily available on the Crime
Agency’s website, there were 179 murders in Sweden, of which 29
involved guns; in 2014 there were 317, of which 74 involved guns.
Some of the violence
is closely linked to the appearance of gangs of Balkan and Middle
Eastern origin among refugee groupings who fight for control of the
drugs trade, among other things. There were around 40 unsolved gang
murders on police files at the end of last year.
Rape statistics are
harder to judge. The raw figures suggest a huge rise in reports, from
1,707 in 1995 to 6,697 in 2014. But, as the Julian Assange case
showed, there is perhaps less stigma about reporting the crime than
elsewhere, and the Swedish legal definition of rape is wider than in
other countries. In any case, the police do not record the ethnicity
of either criminals or victims, and the press is extremely
constrained over reporting identifying details about either the
victims or the perpetrators of crimes.
So it is impossible
either to prove or to disprove, from official statistics, the
nationalist claim that the rapists are disproportionately young male
migrants. Yet that claim is repeated as a fact in racist and
xenophobic parts of the internet. What is certain is that you would
hardly ever find it mentioned, even to refute, in the reputable
Swedish media – until last week.
This is the really
damaging effect of the Stockholm scandal – and it is worth noting
that only one of the reported assaults at the festival was classed as
rape: most were mob gropings, which are still terrifying and criminal
violations.
The Swedish
political and media establishment decided to deal with the threat of
a nationalist and xenophobic party, the Sweden Democrats, by ignoring
them and hoping they would go away. This policy was fuelled partly by
wishful thinking, partly by principle and partly by
self-righteousness. It ended disastrously.
The Sweden Democrats
broke into parliament in 2010 and now hold the balance of power
there, although all of the other parties have combined to vote so as
to neutralise them. The result of that, again predictably, has been
that their support has risen to unprecedented levels – 20% in the
last poll I saw. The recent clampdown on immigration can only
strengthen them further.
The Social
Democrats, and their newspaper, Aftonbladet, appear to have been
particularly keen on the posture of suppression and denial, because
the great majority of the Sweden Democrats’ voters had been Social
Democrats, rather than traditional rightwingers.
It is absolutely
clear – with the publication of internal memos by the newspaper
Dagens Nyheter – that the Stockholm police failed to report the sex
assaults at the festival for fear of worsening ethnic tensions. And
it was understood by all parties that this would lead to an electoral
advantage for the Sweden Democrats.
The organisers, who
also allegedly knew what was going on, were concerned for the success
of the festival and did not want to frighten away the teenagers who
were its target audience.
So teenage girls
were systematically assaulted and robbed by gangs of young foreign
men because too many powerful people found their suffering was
inconvenient. The result of this cover-up will be far more damaging
than the truth could have been.
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