A whopping 8350 rapes were reported in Sweden last year according to new preliminary statistics released by the National Council for Crime Prevention. This is a new record high, with a 6% increase from 2018 which saw 7840 reported rapes.

Worryingly, 3410 of the reported rapes were committed against children aged 0-17 years old. We are seeing a worrying trend in Sweden where children are more often becoming victims of crimes, for example there was 2480 reported robberies against children in 2019 which is a 31% increase from the year before.

Already in 2010 a report from the UN organization UNODC showed that Sweden had the second highest number of rapes in the world per capita, only the African country of Lesotho had more rapes.

Since then the rapes in Sweden have soared to new record levels. During the last decade there was a 40% increase in rapes, from 5960 reported rapes in the year 2010 to 8350 reported rapes in the year 2019.

It is likely however that the real number of rapes are much higher than what is being reported. In 2011 the university of Lund published a report stating that it is likely that a massive 80-90% of rapes go unreported to authorities. This means that the actual number of rapes in Sweden could be somewhere between 42 000 – 83 000, and that there could be upwards of 227 rapes happening every day in Sweden.

Looking over a longer time period shows an even more solemn statistic. In 1975 there was 421 reported rapes, contrasted with 8350 reported rapes in 2019. This is an increase of about 2000% in 44 years.

Some have however claimed that the high number of rapes in Sweden are attributed to the fact that the definition of rape in Sweden is different than other countries, and that rapes are recorded differently in the statistics.

In Sweden each case of sexual violence is recorded as a separate incident. For example, if someone claims they were raped every day by a partner for 30 days, this would be counted as 30 separate rapes, while in other countries this could be recorded as a single rape.

In addition, Sweden did broaden the definition of rape in 2005. However, we have seen that the number of rapes in Sweden have continued to skyrocket even long after they broadened the definition of rape, meaning that however you look at the statistics, the number of rapes in Sweden have increased dramatically the last decade.