Female sacrifice hasn’t ended. It has just been transferred from the altars of pagan gods to that of political correctness, and the rending of bodies takes a back seat to the searing of souls.

If you had to pick a contender for rape capital of the world, Sweden wouldn’t likely come to mind. Yet it now has the second-highest “official” rape rate of any country. It’s 53.2 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants is five times the United States’ rate and is only surpassed by Lesotho, a tiny nation in the middle of southern Africa.

It wasn’t always this way. Once an extremely safe land, violent crime in Sweden has increased 300 percent since 1975. That year, write Scandinavian journalists Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard, “421 rapes were reported to the police; in 2014, it was 6,620. That is an increase of 1,472%.” Why is 1975 significant?

Because that’s the year the Swedish government decided to adopt an immigration regime that would transform Sweden into a “multicultural” country.

This is also significant because 77.6 percent of the country’s rapists are identified as “foreigners” (and that’s significant because in Sweden, “foreigner” is generally synonymous with "immigrant from Muslim country"). And even this likely understates the issue, since the Swedish government — in an effort to obscure the problem — records second-generation Muslim perpetrators simply as “Swedes.”

Moreover, writes Carlqvist and Hedegaard, “A new trend reached Sweden with full force over the past few decades: gang rape — virtually unknown before in Swedish criminal history. The number of gang rapes increased spectacularly between 1995 and 2006. Since then no studies of them have been undertaken.” The last line gets at a different trend: A refusal to investigate the nature of crime in Sweden for fear that the truth will contradict multiculturalist dogma. This is similar to Baltimore, Maryland, where violent crime is “down” — because the authorities have simply stopped arresting many criminals.

Carlqvist and Hedegaard then reported on a sexual assault that Sweden's public prosecutor called “the worst crime of rape in Swedish criminal history,” a brutal 2012 gang rape of a 30-year old woman by eight "foreign" men. The punishment? Seven of the perpetrators will likely serve just over 3.5 years in prison, Carlqvist and Hedegaard tell us (they provided no information on the eighth).

Yet, incredibly, this might be considered a firm hand in Sweden. The journalists also report, “In cases of gang rape, culprits and victims are most often young and in almost every case, the perpetrators are of immigrant background, mostly from Muslim countries. In an astounding number of cases, the Swedish courts have demonstrated sympathy for the rapists. Several times the courts have acquitted suspects who have claimed that the girl wanted sex with six, seven or eight men.”

As an example, after the 2013 gang rape of a 15-year-old girl in a Stockholm suburb, a lower court convicted the six “foreign” perpetrators, but, write Carlqvist and Hedegaard, “the court of appeals acquitted them because no violence had occurred, and because the court determined that the girl ‘had not been in a defenseless position.’”

Such rulings should raise eyebrows and ire anywhere, but they’re especially profound in Sweden. A land of über-feminism, the nation’s Left Party (its actual name) proposed in 2004 what was called the “Man Tax,” a special levy on men to compensate society for the cost of “male violence.” Some years before there was a story about another Swedish feminist crusade: an effort to compel boys and men to sit down while urinating (seriously), in the thinking that standing up during the act was symbolic of male dominance. Before you laugh, know that the urinals had been removed from one elementary school on this basis.

The point is that Sweden is a country where men are now often guilty until proven innocent — except in one situation. There is a politically correct hierarchy of “victim” groups, and, it appears, “Muslim” trumps “female.” This explains why rape in Sweden is both exaggerated and covered up. As to the former, Carlqvist and Hedegaard cite the government’s claim that “the law has been changed so that more sexual offences are now classed as rape” as a specious excuse for the climb in the rape rate. Yet in deference to feminism, Sweden did long ago expand the definition of rape beyond reason. This brings us to the cover-up: This policy change is used to explain away the Muslim factor in sexual attack, which finds its roots, says a critic, “in Islam's culture to rape and brutalize women who refuse to comply with Islamic teachings.”

To illustrate the zeal for effecting the cover-up, note that this critic — a local Sweden Democrat Party politician named Michael Hess — was convicted of the hate-speech charge "denigration of ethnic groups" for making his claim. It didn’t matter that he has lived in Muslim countries and that at his trial he presented evidence on the Sharia law position on rape; the court claimed, reports Dispatch International, “that the question of whether or not Michael Hess's pronouncement is true, or appeared to be true to Michael Hess, has no bearing on the case.”

In fact, the truth seems very inconvenient for Sweden’s multiculturalist program. So much so, that the nation’s complicit media will tell bold-faced lies to advance it. For example, Carlqvist and Hedegaard point out that a brutal gang rape aboard a Finnish ferry this month was reported by the following newspapers thus:

• "Several Swedish Men Suspected of Rape on the Finland Ferry" (Dagens Nyheter).

• "Six Swedish Men Raped Woman in Cabin" (Aftonbladet).

• "Six Swedes Arrested for Rape on Ferry" (Expressen).

• "Eight Swedes Suspected of Rape on Ferry" (TT – the Swedish News Agency).

The problem? All the suspects were Muslim — and all were foreign nationals, having no Swedish citizenship. This didn’t stop the media from turning them into “honorary Swedes,” however.

Oh, when journalists from Aftonposten and Expressen were asked by Internet radio station Granskning Sverige about this blatantly dishonest reportage, they said it was “irrelevant” and that they were “offended” at the suggestion they had a responsibility to tell women the truth. As Carlqvist and Hedegaard wrote:

One journalist asked why that should be their responsibility.

"If the women knew, then perhaps they would have stayed away from these men and avoided being raped," said the reporter from Granskning Sverige. Whereupon the journalist slammed down the phone.

Perhaps, though, they fear going the way of Ingrid Carlqvist. She left Sweden some years ago. Why? Because when you oppose immigration in her nation, as she explained, others will “point at you and say you are a racist; then you will have no job, no career, you might lose your family. You will have no future.”

And if she ever wants to come back, she may have to play by different rules. After all, as multiculturalist social engineer and Social Democrat politician Mona Sahlin put it in 2001, “the Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden; the old Sweden is never coming back.”