Is rampant rape the price Finnish women must pay for giving asylum to Muslim migrants? Finland, now, has become “one of the least safe countries in Europe for women,” according to Finland’s leading newspaper, “all because of the Muslim influx.”

lye An Ilta-Sanomat headline proclaims crimes committed by asylum seekers have increased dramatically. Swedish-language Hufvudstadsbladet asked a criminologist who says having an immigrant background doesn’t explain criminality and that the issue is more complicated than that.

Finland’s biggest daily newspaper devoted many column inches to the issue of rape. The topic of rape and violence against women has come to the forefront of discussion in Finnish media since highly-publicised incidents of rape committed by asylum seekers in recent weeks.

Only one in four rapes reported to police In the year 2000, HS displayed on a graph, 488 rapes were reported and in 2014 that number was 940 reported rapes. So far this year (from January to October) the figure stands at 864 reported rapes.

A colourful map shows that Finland is one of the top countries in the EU for incidents of violence against women. Using figures from the European Agency for Fundamental Rights, some 47 percent of women in Finland have experienced violence at some point in their lives since the age of 15.

The only other country in the EU with a higher percentage is Denmark, with 52 percent. Among the lowest percentages of violence against women were in Hungary (21 percent), Ireland (15 percent) and Austria (13 percent).

Citing Helsinki University’s Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy figures, the paper writes that incidents of reported rapes by immigrants were about eight times higher than that of native Finns. The paper also writes that the most reported rapes were committed by people from the Middle East and Northern Africa.