New crime study: Rise in Sweden’s rape stats can’t be tied to refugee influx

There is little disagreement on these basic facts. Determining the reason behind these numbers is another matter, however.

Some say it is due to the way in which sexual crimes are reported in Sweden, where all reported events are recorded as crimes and several offences of the same type are recorded separately. In other words, if someone reports being raped by the same perpetrator five times, in Sweden that would be recorded as five potential crimes rather than one.

Others use the spike in rape statistics after 2015 to argue that the increases are due to the large influx of refugees into Sweden. This is an argument that can be found all over certain sectors of online media, where Sweden is positioned as the 'rape capital' of the world and the finger is pointed, either implicitly or explicitly, squarely at the new arrivals from predominantly Muslim cultures.

The results of that study were released on Wednesday but they may do little to quell the debate. Brå analyzed statistics from official police reports and its own National Safety Survey (NTU) results between 2005 and 2017, focusing on both rapes and 'sexual molestation' (sexuellt ofredande), a rather broad category that can include anything from inappropriate touching to sending sexually explicit messages.

Both crimes increased dramatically over that time span, with sexual molestation incidents involving victims aged 15 or older more than doubling from 3,400 to 7,400 and rapes nearly doubling from 3,000 to 5,300. A previous report from Brå showed that rapes overall increased by ten percent in 2017 alone.

While the percentage of those reporting violent rapes showed more or less no change, the number of people who reported in the NTU that they had been subjected to other types of sexual assaults more than doubled, from less than one percent of respondents to just under 2.5 percent.

Brå concludes that the initial spike in figures seen after 2005 "is largely explained by the legal definition of rape expanding" in that same year.

The second major increase in rape and other sexual crime statistics occurs after 2015, which fuels the argument that it is connected to the increase of asylum seekers in Sweden. But Brå concludes that this is not the case.

The board openly acknowledges that because NTU results do not include any information on ethnicity, it can only offer "tentative analyzes that cannot give easy answers" but it says the numbers don't add up.

The roughly 163,000 people who came to Sweden in 2015 corresponds to 1.6 percent of the national population. Brå writes that "it is not unreasonable to think that the over-risk of crime would be higher for the asylum seekers who came in 2015, because many of them were men, and many were unaccompanied boys".

The council writes that even if it assumes that these male asylum seekers are five times more likely to commit crimes than those already in the country, their arrival could only account for an eight percent increase in sex crimes.

To place the blame for the entirety of the increases seen in the rape statistics between 2015 and 2016, one would have to assume that asylum seekers are 83 times more likely to commit crimes than others.

"Such a high over-risk does not seem likely," the report concludes.

The report also found that the rise in reported rapes between 2011 and 2017 was linked to incidents that did not involve the use of violence, committed by perpetrators known to the victim – which also make up the majority of sexual crimes. There was no rise in outdoor attacks by strangers in the same time period.

While this reveals very little about the identity or ethnicity of the attackers, it contradicts the theory floated by hard-right media that there are immigrant men wantonly attacking Swedish women.

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