2) There is no rape epidemic in Sweden
If you spend any time in the conservative media, particularly alt-right or anti-Islam sites, there’s a more specific narrative about Sweden than the one about crime in general. It’s about rape — specifically, that Muslim immigrants are raping Swedish women in unprecedented numbers.
Breitbart has published an enormous number of pieces in recent years on the alleged immigrant rape crisis in Sweden, focusing on cities like Malmö with large Muslim immigrant populations. Representative headlines include “Police warn of child rape epidemic in migrant-occupied Malmö” and “Migrants jailed after woman abducted at gun point, gang-raped in hookah bar basement.”
So to be fair to Trump, we need to look at rape rates specifically — to see if there’s any evidence that rape, specifically, has gone up as a result of immigration. So what do the official statistics say?
First, the rape rate in Sweden is baseline higher than in other European countries. This is mostly because of a change in Swedish law in 2005 that expanded the definition of rape (including having sex with someone while they’re sleeping) and started counting each instance of sexual violence as a separate attack. Klara Selin, a sociologist at Sweden’s National Council for Crime Prevention, explained what this means in a 2012 interview with the BBC:
So, for instance, when a woman comes to the police and she says my husband or my fiance raped me almost every day during the last year, the police have to record each of these events, which might be more than 300 events. In many other countries it would just be one record — one victim, one type of crime, one record.
This expanded definition, together with a growing feminist emovement in the country aimed at holding perpetrators accountable, has led to an increase in reported rape after the law’s passage. But the underlying rate of attacks likely didn’t actually change much.
“The major explanation is partly that people go to the police more often, but also the fact that in 2005 there has been reform in the sex crime legislation, which made the legal definition of rape much wider than before,” Selin told the BBC.
So if there had been a huge surge in sexual assault, this would show up in the overall stats given the huge number of immigrants coming into the country and the relatively large number of Swedish women who report being abused. But that has not happened.
“What we’re hearing is
a very, very extreme exaggeration based on a few isolated events, and the claim that it’s related to immigration is more or less
not true at all,” Jerzy Sarnecki, a criminologist at Stockholm University, told the Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders.
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