How
Sweden's youth homes nurtured killers, creating Europe's gun crime capital
By Johan
Ahlander
June 24,
20241:57 PM GMT+2Updated 7 months ago
GOTHENBURG,
Sweden, June 24 (Reuters) - The killer was only 14 and had lived in youth homes
as a ward of the authorities since he was eight.
A year ago,
a gang helped the boy escape, put him up in a hotel and gave him cannabis, food
and new clothes. Six days later, gang members told him it was time to repay
them for their kindness. They had a job for him.
Together
with another youth, the boy, who as a juvenile cannot be identified, shot dead
a 33-year-old Hells Angels biker. He was convicted by a court which described
the case as a gangland contract killing.
As he was
too young to be sentenced, he was handed back to social services and sent to
another youth home.
Sweden has
long prided itself on one of the world's most generous social safety nets, with
a state that looks after vulnerable people at all stages of life.
But these
days it also has another distinction: by far the highest per capita rate of gun
violence in the EU. Last year 55 people were shot dead in 363 separate
shootings in a country of just 10 million people. By comparison, there were
just six fatal shootings in the three other Nordic countries - Norway, Finland
and Denmark - combined.
In an
increasing number of cases, courts have found the epidemic of violence emerging
from Sweden's archipelago of youth homes, built to serve the dual purpose of
looking after children in state care and punishing youth offenders.
According to
accounts for this story from eight sources including a former gang member,
several youth home workers, prosecutors and criminologists, the homes have
turned into recruiting grounds for gangs, who use them to enlist killers too
young to be jailed.
As the
Arctic region increasingly comes into the geopolitical spotlight,
TROUBLED
TEEN TO 'CAREER CRIMINAL'
Yayha, now
23, was first sent to a youth home at 16, finding himself bunking with seven
other boys in a dormitory wing in Gothenburg, the gritty port city on Sweden's
west coast that houses the biggest harbour in Scandinavia.
His father
had died a couple of years earlier. He had dropped out of school and was
convicted of assault and theft, beating up other kids and stealing their phones
and clothes.
During his
year in the home, members of one of Gothenburg's criminal gangs became his new
family, he told Reuters in a coffee shop by the harbour in the city where he
now works as a carpenter after escaping the gang life.
"I was
a troubled teen when I entered and came out a career criminal. I went from
fighting and stealing from other kids to selling drugs by the kilo," said
Yayha, who asked that his surname not be used to prevent his former gang from
finding him.
"You
wanted the respect, the clothes, the rings, the money but also friendship. They
were the people you hung out with anyway. Later it became more serious and you
had to do things that you really didn't want to, but that is the way it
works."
The wave of
violence has come to overshadow all else in Swedish politics, driving the rise
of a rightwing coalition with support of the far right, which came to power in
2022, ending the latest eight-year period of rule by the Social Democrats,
Sweden's dominant political party since the 1930s.
The new
government has promised to tackle crime. So far it has further restricted
Sweden's previously generous immigration policies, introduced harsher sentences
for gun crimes and given police increased surveillance powers. Even the
military has been called on to help out.
"It is
obvious that our system wasn't built for this type of criminality,"
Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer told Reuters.
He said the
government was working on a revamp of the entire youth criminality prevention
system, including giving more powers to social services. New youth prisons
would house the most hardened criminals, keeping them separate from youth
homes.
"I
think it is clear that in reality the state-run homes have functioned as a kind
of recruitment base from the criminal networks," Strommer said. "It's
a monumental failure."
'LINKEDIN
FOR YOUNG CRIMINALS'
Sweden's
youth homes have varying degrees of security, with around 700 of the most
troubled youths housed in 21 homes run by a state body, the National Board of
Institutional Care (SiS).
Children
with social problems can find themselves sleeping in beds next to those who
have committed serious crimes. Most children stay for less than a year but some
can be held for up to four years.
The homes
are often fenced off, with schools and parks on the premises. While the youths
are not allowed to leave without permission, security is often lax.
Residents
have access to phones and tablets making it possible for gang members to
contact them from outside. In one case now being tried, prosecutors have
charged a boy of 15 with planning and ordering three murders in Stockholm from
inside a youth home.
Birgitta
Dahlberg, head of youth care at the SiS, told Reuters it was unfair to blame
the homes for their inability to deal with serious violent offenders, which
they were not designed to handle.
"When
it comes to serious criminality, it is fair to say that the legislation has not
given us the right conditions," she said, noting that until regulations
were changed just weeks ago staff did not even have sufficient authority to
take away residents' mobile phones.
Children as
young as 12 are often gang members already by the time they arrive, said
Alexander, who works at the Gothenburg home where Yahya stayed. He declined to
give his surname as he was not authorised to speak publicly.
"Out of
our 40 boys, around half are gang affiliated when they come here," he told
Reuters.
"If you
put two new kids in a wing where six out of eight inmates are with the Foxtrot
gang, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what could happen," he said,
referring to one of the largest gangs believed to have hundreds of members.
Two other
youth home workers, speaking on condition of anonymity, gave similar accounts
of rampant gang membership among their charges.
In theory,
the youth homes aim to rehabilitate young offenders to prevent them from
becoming adult criminals. But according to a report released weeks ago by the
Swedish National Audit Office which supervises government, nine out of ten
gang-affiliated youngsters at youth homes go on to relapse into crime, and
almost eight out of ten eventually end up in prison.
The youth
homes seem to do more harm than good, said Stockholm prosecutor Lisa dos
Santos, who has handled numerous cases of youth gang crimes.
"One
police officer described them as LinkedIn for young criminals," she said.
"You wonder what effect they have had in spreading gang crime when boys
from different parts of the country are put together."
While
Swedish law allows criminal prosecution of people as young as 15, those under
18 are very rarely sent to prison even for serious crimes. Dos Santos said
gangs are exploiting this, deliberately recruiting children to commit acts that
would lead to a long jail sentence for an adult.
Sweden has
about 14,000 active gang criminals and an additional 48,000 people loosely
affiliated with gangs, according to a police report last year.
Other
European countries such as the Netherlands, France and Belgium are also
struggling with violent gangs, but Sweden has outpaced them all in gun
violence, by wide margins.
In 2022,
there were 73 youths in Sweden aged 15-20 suspected of murder or attempted
murder with firearms, up from just 10 a decade earlier, according to the Crime
Prevention Board, a government agency.
According to
EU statistics agency Eurostat, 25 people aged 15-24 were killed by gun violence
in Sweden in 2021, second in the EU only to France, which had 40 such deaths
across a population six times the size of Sweden's.
Nils Duquet,
director of the Flemish Peace Institute, a leading European gun violence think
tank, said the reliance of Sweden's gangs on young recruits to commit violent
crimes had created a different culture around guns than elsewhere in Europe.
Elsewhere,
criminal gangs tend to reserve access to guns for older and more senior
members, he said. In Sweden, the youngest are expected to pull the trigger.
"Because
there are so many young criminals with access to guns, that makes it so
violent," Duquet said.
Reporting by
Johan Ahlander Editing by Niklas Pollard and Peter Graff
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