David Brown, Gatestone Institute, January 30, 2019

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Yet, this strange, seemingly forgotten land has a hideously metropolitan problem: Finland’s daughters are the target of grooming gangs.

In December 2018, Oulu police reported the arrest of seven men accused of repeatedly raping a ten-year-old girl. The police say the girl has allegedly been subjected to multiple sexual assaults over several months in the suspects’ homes.

The men, aged 20 to 40, all arrived in Finland as migrants or refugees in recent years (32,000 sought asylum here during the migrant wave in 2015) and are thought to have made contact with the victim on social media.

Locals in Oulu told Gatestone that many have observed the majority-Muslim migrant gangs in action in the local shopping mall; they send out their best-looking, nicely-scented friends to hook in young Finnish girls. Parents here are fearful for their children.

Finland’s Prime Minister Juha Sipilä took to Twitter to express his shock and anger, writing that “a sexual offence against a child is an inhumane act, and its wickedness cannot be comprehended.”

His naïveté seems startling. Internationally acknowledged studies on grooming gangs in the UK clearly evidence that this is a “wickedness” well-documented and well understood. There is no reason for it to come as a surprise.

His country’s official statistics from 2017 reveal that — nationally — Iraqi and Afghan migrants were represented up to 40 times more amongst sexual assault suspects than native Finns.

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Sure enough, Oulu’s police now suspect 16 foreign-born men of rape or other sexual abuses of girls aged between the ages of 10 and 15, and have added another four men to their investigation.

In addition, police in Finland’s capital, Helsinki, have acknowledged that they have arrested three foreign-born men on similar charges.

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It was evidently the “blatant” failings of police and politicians that allowed these men to continue raping and abusing these children; the authorities reportedly remained silent either for political gain or to avoid professional damage.

Much of the coverage of the same problem in Great Britain said that Jay had accused the Rotherham council and police of failing to tackle sexual exploitation because of misplaced “political correctness.” Yet Jay says those are not the words she would use:

{snip} Instead, she believes the Labour-dominated council turned a blind eye to the problem because of “their desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour, to not rock the boat, to keep a lid on it, to hope it would go away.

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Initial reports suggest that the abused girls and their parents were not necessarily believed; the police responded only after the strong intervention of the father and step-father of one victim, who set a trap for one of the groomers online. It was this intervention that led a local councilman to uncover the fact that in a two-day period, “a total of 8 men with migrant names had been incarcerated for child sexual abuse, aggravated child sexual abuse and aggravated rape.”

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{snip} Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, who maintained a firm silence on the matter during all of December 2018, has now changed course to appear concerned and action-oriented.

He expressed “grief and disgust” at the spate of sexual crimes, and claimed that he understood the worry and anxiety that many people are feeling. In a statement, he stressed that everyone who comes to Finland should respect Finland’s laws and the principle of personal integrity. He also emphasised that Finland’s asylum system cannot protect criminals, and called the assaults “completely inhumane and reprehensible.”

It would be generous to describe ordinary Finns as skeptical of his stance. Most sneer openly at the hypocrisy of a man who was hugely afflicted by the migrant madness of 2015, welcoming 32,000 migrants to this tiny country, and even telling the state’s media that his exclusive family home in Kempele, located 500km north of the capital Helsinki, could be used to accommodate asylum seekers.

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Despite bold assertions that action would be taken and the laws regarding asylum seekers would be tightened, in recent conversations regarding the numbers of migrants to be accepted from the EU quota system, politicians such as the interior minister were still campaigning to increase the refugee quota tenfold. {snip}

As well as the hypocrisy of this position, there is also a grating apathy prevalent in the administration. {snip}

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A brave few have broken cover to address the problem head-on. Seida Sohrabi’s Kurdish family sought asylum in Finland when she was five years old. Her interview for Ilya Sanomat, one of the two main tabloid newspapers in Finland, was so keenly observed that the emotionally cool Finns, from both the political left and right, took a sharp collective intake of cold breath.

Her words are chillingly familiar to the experiences of victims of grooming gangs in the UK. {snip}

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{snip} Anter Yasa , the founder and co-chair of Secular Immigrants of Finland says he has been black-listed from appearing in TV interviews because of his honesty about the problem — a problem perpetuated by imams in Finnish mosques.

In January, the Andalus Islamic Center of Kastelholm, in Helsinki’s Puolinharju area, published a message to its followers featuring a picture of two lollipops. One was unwrapped, dirty and covered with insects; the other was not.

“This is why the Hijab plays an important role in Islam,” it said. The evident message to their Muslim and non-Muslim followers is that an uncovered woman is dirty, literally, and can be used by anyone.

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For now, the fight back is being led by the Finns Party, a nationalist party leading the conversation on this matter in the country, and which — unlike the others – — has been consistent in its message on asylum-seekers and the dangers of Islam in Western society. Somewhat controversially in these liberal lands, it seeks to put Finns first. Unsurprisingly since speaking out, the Twitter account of the leader of the Finns Party — Jussi Halla-aho — has been locked for a period.

{snip} Evidence from other countries has shown, repeatedly, the link between a conservative branch of Islam and sexual aggression. While the police and politicians remain keen to keep the problem under wraps, and the media and digital giants censor voices speaking openly about it, the gangs will continue to flourish.

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