New study in Sweden links immigrants to violence

In one report from 2014, the study found that more than two-thirds of the suspected rapists in the years 2008 and 2009 were foreign nationals and their typical victim was “a young woman of Swedish nationality”.

It is a worrying trend as a new approach in Sweden for the treatment of sexual offenders started in 2002. The Canadian program was generously offered and was translated and adjusted to Swedish conditions. The program was accredited in Sweden by an external accreditation panel in 2006 (Kwarnmark & Hasselrot, 2006) and is now running in all Sweden’s prisons.

Aftonbladet, Sweden’s largest tabloid, argued that it is “racist” to point out that the perpetrators in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve was described as North African or Arab. Another Aftonbladet article said that reporting on the Cologne attacks is “bowing to right-wing extremism”.

The language police is seemingly far stricter in preventing the “wrong” terminology than preventing violence against women.

The Sweden Democrats are the anti-immigrationists in Sweden, the third–largest party after the election of 2014. Opinion polls suggest they are growing, but for this reason they are reviled by all other parties and because of that immigration cannot be discussed frankly in Sweden. Negative remarks about refugees or immigrants, are considered “far-right” and as a result, even legitimate concerns are silenced or labelled anti-social.

In the aftermath of the terror attack in Sweden, Swedish officials were careful to assign only positive descriptions to Islamic foreigners.

Tino Sanandaji from the University of Chicago, who is currently a researcher at the Institute for Economic and Business History Research in Stockholm, says the last time there was an official government report breaking down crime statistics by immigrant status and origin was in 2005, for the years 1997 to 2001.

These statistics confirmed that immigrants were significantly overrepresented amongst offenders, in particular in committing violent crimes. The foreign born were four times more likely to be suspects in homicide cases than those with Swedish origin, and 4.5 times more likely to be suspects in rape cases.

Since then, he notes that Swedish criminologists and mainstream politicians have made sure that no new statistics have been released. Not a single recent research study in Sweden has attempted to estimate the causal effect of immigration on sexual assault or homicide rates. Parliament actually defeated a motion to produce up-to-date crime statistics based on national origin.

In Malmö police officers were investigating 11 murders and 80 attempted murders in January, as well as “other crimes of violence, beatings, rapes, thefts and frauds”, the Express reported.

This is the city’s second serious surge of violence in the past 12 months. In July last year, national police units were deployed to the city to help stop a spate of bombings, shootings and arson attacks.

Meanwhile Facebook posts critical of the EU’s migrant policies, for example, are being categorized as “Islamophobia”, and are often found to violate “Community Standards”, while incitement to actual violence and the murder of Swedes or Germans or other Europeans are generally considered as conforming to Facebook’s “Community Standards”.