I CARE - - Sweden: Are Migrants Really Raping Women?

18.7.16

I CARE - - News - Internet Centre Anti Racism Europe - Responding to the January incident in an editorial published by the Swedish magazine Mänsklig Säkerhet, Martina Lindberg, a former lecturer on women, peace, and security matters at Stockholm's Swedish Defense University, notes a skewed gender imbalance among asylum seekers in Sweden, with an estimated two-thirds of refugees being male. However, she argues that while the Swedish government should acknowledge this imbalance and adapt appropriate integration measures, it should not allow individual sex crimes to form what she calls "the basis for a simplified approach to the asylum-seeking man." "Violence against women in the public sphere has been more or less constant in recent years," she wrote. "It seems as if the debate today depends more on who is assumed to be the perpetrator."

Indeed, according to official statistics on file with The Swedish Crime Survey, the sexual violence rate in Sweden has remained about the same between 2005 and 2014. In fact, it actually decreased by .3 percent between 2013 and 2014. That said, the country has the highest rate of rape in Europe, a statistic that has been partially attributed to both Swedish law, wherein rape is given a wider definition than in other countries, as well as a higher tendency among women to report the crimes to the police. "It is much more complicated than the way the media are normally presenting it," Jerzy Sarnecki, a professor of criminology at Stockholm University, told The Daily Beast. "According to studies which I have done on general crime, most of the differences in recorded crimes between immigrants and Swedes are explained by socioeconomic factors. It doesn't mean of course, that one, a few, or several other incidents of that kind (sexual assaults perpetuated by immigrants) didn't happen. "