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After all, Sweden may not have been affected by the largest known rape epidemic in the Western world.
Brå comes to a conclusion in that direction, possibly not entirely surprising, in a new report.
Photo: Erik Nylander / TT
Emergency room for raped people in a Stockholm hospital.
“The rape epidemic is the great betrayal of our time,” proclaimed Svenska Dagbladet a few years ago.
In a debate article in the American Wall Street Journal, Jimmie Åkesson and SD chief strategist Mattias Karlsson stepped up the effort even further.
“Welcome to the country of rapes, Sweden” was the dramatic announcement that was followed by a story as black as a Nordic night in February about the country that not only tops European statistics on reported rapes, but is also the second worst of the OECD, only the battle of Australia.
Brå, the Swedish Crime Prevention Council, today presented a study that looked more closely at the statistics on this crime in Europe, which turned out to be a complex task.
For one thing, there are different legal definitions of what a violation is. In some countries, it is required that the aggressor used force or that the victim physically resisted. In Sweden, it is sufficient for a person to have been in a “particularly vulnerable situation”, for example severely intoxicated or asleep.
These aren’t subtle criminal law differences to grapple with in dusty academic seminars. This matters. About 40 percent of the completed rapes reported in Sweden in 2016 contained no trace of violence.
The way of counting differs in part. When a person in Sweden says they have been abused, they become a statistical hurdle. In Germany, an investigation must first be carried out before someone decides whether it is a rape or not. So some fall off.
Åkesson has for Agree that Sweden is the highest in Europe in terms of reports of this category of crime.
An average of 63 people per 100,000 inhabitants per year went to the police during the 2013-2017 period.
But even a quick inspection of the vibrating table should make anyone suspicious. Is it really reasonable to assume that Bulgaria has only two and Greece only one for every 100,000 inhabitants? Is the difference between us and them really that big?
Many have pointed out, with good reason, that the violations reported are a powerful measuring instrument. Being high can even be positive. This may be because girls and women in a country like Sweden are less likely to accept abuse than their sisters in, say, Portugal, which with its four percent is also at the bottom.
Researchers from Abrupt however, he has not been content to speculate as to what the big differences might be. They have taken their criminological work seriously and have investigated the matter further.
They have recalculated the Swedish statistics to be comparable with the figures for Germany, a country reminiscent of Sweden and which has also shown evidence of joy in having order and order.
The result is interesting. With the same legal and statistical conditions, the number of rape reports in Sweden is reduced by three-quarters.
Suddenly, the dark and cold country of the Nordic region goes from being the worst in the world to being in the middle of the European scale. It is still an unacceptable situation, but it is still far from being a nightmare as some claim.
There should be a series of collaborative explanations for the numbers that spread so wildly. One may be that trust in the judiciary is significantly higher in Sweden than in some southern European countries.
Another is that the view of sexual abuse in Stockholm is more modern than in Sofia. There may be more widespread support for vulnerable women here. Something that in turn affects the numbers.
So how will this report be received? There are reasons to suspect that there will be a life and a fight in certain settings.
At the far end of the extreme swamp on one flank, there has long been a neurotic relationship with criminologists in general and with Brå in particular.
As long as your reports show that immigrants are overrepresented in crime and the number of murders is increasing, it is all to your satisfaction.
But as soon as a study suggests that their worldview may not be one hundred percent in line with reality, researchers turn into a collection of state-paid manipulators to hide that Muslims, gays and feminists have formed an alliance to seize the monarchy and overthrow HM King Carl XVI Gustaf.
These performances to some extent it has found its way into the room, clean and correct. There are, to put it mildly, professional categories that are, of course, higher than forensic scientists.
“Rapes reported and resolved in Europe”, of course, does not offer the definitive truth about how common these crimes are in Sweden. But some form of truth contains it.
I think its greatest merit is that it shows that there are reasons to be careful in drawing conclusions from a statistic that, at first glance, undoubtedly seems extremely alarming.
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