Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard, Gatestone Institute, February 14, 2015

In 1975, the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the former homogeneous Sweden into a multicultural country. Forty years later the dramatic consequences of this experiment emerge: violent crime has increased by 300%.

If one looks at the number of rapes, however, the increase is even worse. In 1975, 421 rapes were reported to the police; in 2014, it was 6,620. That is an increase of 1,472%.

Sweden is now number two on the global list of rape countries. According to a survey from 2010, Sweden, with 53.2 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants, is surpassed only by tiny Lesotho in Southern Africa, with 91.6 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants.

According to figures published by The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet; known as Brå)–an agency under the Ministry of Justice–29,000 Swedish women, during 2011, reported that they had been raped (which seems to indicate that less than 25% of the rapes are reported to the police).

Strange explanations

Rather than doing something about the problem of violence and rape, Swedish politicians, public authorities and media do their best to explain away the facts. Here are some of their explanations:

Swedes have become more prone to report crime.

The law has been changed so that more sexual offences are now classed as rape.

Swedish men cannot handle increased equality between the sexes and react with violence against women (perhaps the most fanciful excuse).

A long-held feminist myth is that the most dangerous place for a woman is her own home–that most rapes are committed by someone she knows. This claim was refuted by Brå‘s report:

“In 58% of cases, the perpetrator was entirely unknown by the victim. In 29% of cases the perpetrator was an acquaintance, and in 13% of cases the perpetrator was a person close to the victim.”

Brå reports that there are no major differences between women of Swedish and foreign background when it comes to the risk of being raped. Significantly, the report does not touch on the background of the rapists.

Without parallel

Back in 1975, the year when politicians decided that Sweden was to become multicultural, the Swedish population stood at 8,208,442. By 2014 it had grown to 9,743,087–an increase of 18.7%. This growth is entirely due to immigration, as Swedish women on average give birth to 1.92 children compared to the 2.24 average of immigrant women. One should, however, keep in mind that in the statistics, second-generation immigrants are counted as Swedes.

Sweden’s recent population growth is without parallel. Never before in the country’s history has the number of inhabitants increased so fast. Sweden is now the fastest growing country in Europe.

Over the past 10-15 years, immigrants have mainly come from Muslim countries such as Iraq, Syria and Somalia. Might this mass influx explain Sweden’s rape explosion? It is difficult to give a precise answer, because Swedish law forbids registration based on people’s ancestry or religion. One possible explanation is that, on average, people from the Middle East have a vastly different view of women and sex than Scandinavians have. And despite the attempts by the Swedish establishment to convince the population that everyone setting foot on Swedish soil becomes exactly like those who have lived here for dozens of generations, facts point in an altogether different direction.

The latest statistical survey of immigrant criminality compared to that of Swedes was done in 2005. The results are practically never mentioned. Not only that; anyone who dares refer to them, for example on social media, is viciously attacked.

Denigration of ethnic groups

Michael Hess, a local politician from Sweden Democrat Party, encouraged Swedish journalists to get acquainted with Islam’s view of women, in connection with the many rapes that took place in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the “Arab Spring”. Hess wrote, “When will you journalists realize that it is deeply rooted in Islam’s culture to rape and brutalize women who refuse to comply with Islamic teachings. There is a strong connection between rapes in Sweden and the number of immigrants from MENA-countries [Middle East and North Africa].”

This remark led to Michael Hess being charged with “denigration of ethnic groups” [hets mot folkgrupp], a crime in Sweden. In May last year, he was handed a suspended jail sentence and a fine–the suspension was due to the fact that he had no prior convictions. The verdict has been appealed to a higher court.

For many years, Michael Hess lived in Muslim countries, and he is well acquainted with Islam and its view of women. During his trial, he provided evidence of how sharia law deals with rape, and statistics to indicate that Muslims are vastly overrepresented among perpetrators of rape in Sweden. However, the court decided that facts were irrelevant:

The Court [Tingsrätten] notes 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. Michael Hess’s statement must be judged based on its timing and context. … At the time of the offense, Michael Hess referred neither to established research nor to Islamic sources. It was only in connection with his indictment that Michael Hess tried to find support in research and religious writings. The Court therefore notes that Michael Hess’s pronouncement was obviously not a part of any reasoned [saklig] or trustworthy [vederhäftig] discussion. Michael Hess’s pronouncement must therefore be viewed as an expression of disdain for immigrants with an Islamic faith.

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