Sweden is renowned as a beacon of gender-equality. In 2015, Sweden also exemplified the European Union’s willingness to open its doors to refugees, taking in an estimated 163,000 to join the Swedish population of about 10 million, which was more than any other EU country per capita.

It turns out, the titles of “leader in gender equality” and “refugee paradise” might be hard to hold simultaneously. As the Daily Mail reports:

Women in a town in northern Sweden have been warned not to walk alone at night in the wake of a spike in violent assaults and attempted rapes. Police in Östersund made the unusual move to ask women not to go out unaccompanied after dark, after reports of eight brutal attacks, some by ‘men of foreign appearance’, in just over two weeks. Speaking at a press conference on Monday, police said they ‘have never seen anything like it in Östersund’, a small town in the north of Sweden with a population of just 45,000.


Town officials noted that the perpetrators detained following these attacks were not intoxicated. Being drunk when attacking women certainly isn’t exculpatory, but the fact that these attacks were coldly calculated by clear heads (rather than carried out under a cloud of impaired judgment) suggests a fundamental belief in women’s inferiority and predilection toward violence against women which may be hard to uproot.

The report notes that many community leaders are uncomfortable with the guidance that women must stay indoors at night, saying that the solution to this problem can’t be to curtail women’s freedoms. But what is the solution? Sadly, until EU progressives are willing to consider an alternative, following these precautions may be women’s only choice.