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Yes, Violent Crime Has Spiked In Sweden Since Open Immigration
https://thefederalist.com/2017/03/01/yes-violent-crime-spiked-sweden-since-open-immigration/
BY: ANONYMOUS
The multicultural elite so dominant here and in Europe quite perplex me: what group of people has ever so prided itself on its sensitivity to cultural differences but is, nonetheless, so hopelessly blind to those differences when they (inevitably) manifest themselves?
Multiculturalism, paradoxically, seems to presuppose uniculturalism—that all human beings actually share the same basic moral orientation. This is why we are to “celebrate” diversity, but never deplore it. (Indeed, the elite may well prosecute you, in Sweden as elsewhere in the European Union, if you dare.) Yet reality keeps intruding.
Consider the recent flap over Sweden. Last Saturday, as Robert Spencer reports, “President Trump unleashed an international storm of ridicule…when he said: ‘Here’s the bottom line, we have to keep our country safe. When you look at what’s happening in Germany, when you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden — Sweden. Who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers, they’re having problems like they never thought possible.’”
Trump’s statement here is somewhat unclear. It could be taken, as it was, to mean there was a terror incident on Friday (there wasn’t). “Fake news!” But even when Trump subsequently clarified that he was referring to a segment Fox aired Friday concerning Sweden’s migrant crisis, he was still denounced for spreading “false information.”
Here’s the Fox News segment Trump was referring to. Here, in turn, is CNN’s Don Lemon interviewing Ami Horowitz, the filmmaker whose film the Fox segment featured. Lemon denies violent crime has increased in Sweden. He also denies there is any evidence of a correlation between these crimes and immigration.
Actually, Violent Crime Has Increased in Sweden
So, has Sweden experienced an increase in violent crime? Well, Sweden’s official statistics do show increases in “lethal violence” (which includes murder, manslaughter and other deadly assaults) and sexual offenses over the past ten years. Between 2006 and 2015 the incidence of “lethal violence” does fluctuate, but there is a sharp 65 percent spike from 2012 to 2015. In the same period, there was also an almost 49 percent increase in sexual offenses (a category including, among other offenses, rape).
Looking at rape by itself, from 2006-2015 there was a 40 percent increase in the number of reported rapes. It is true that the number of rapes declined from 2014 to 2015, from a high of 6,697 to a still-high 5,918; but, even so, the overall upward trend is clear.
Other Swedes, namely Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard, argue these trends are much sharper if one takes a longer view:
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 United Nations data, in 2010 Sweden had the second highest rate of rape in the world. Also, the 2010 number—5,960 reported rapes—was not much higher than the 2015 number—5,918. The police, by the way, only locate less than 15 percent of the perpetrators.
Data Also Suggests the Uptick Is Due to Immigrants
More controversial is what explains these increases. Some contend the increase in rape is simply a statistical phenomenon due to the application of an expanded definition of rape in 2005 and again in 2013. Others suggest Swedish women have simply grown bolder about reporting things that happened previously but went unreported. Maybe, but in the same period, as Carlqvist and Hedegaard point out, “the number of gang rapes [in Sweden] increased spectacularly.” In rapes of this kind “culprits and victims are most often young and in almost every case, the perpetrators are of immigrant background, mostly from Muslim countries.”
So might immigration help explain the increases in violent crime and rape? It is difficult to determine this, Carlqvist and Hedegaard note, because the Swedish government is no longer interested in collecting the data necessary to examine this possible connection. Indeed, the government is not only not looking for such a connection but is also actively suppressing the release of evidence supporting one.
This wasn’t always the case. As Carlqvist and Hedegaard also note, the data collected before the government stopped collecting such data does show a strong correlation:
As part of the evidence Michael Hess presented in court, he made use of whatever statistics existed on immigrant criminality in Sweden before the statistical authorities stopped measuring. Michael Hess tried to find answers to two questions:
- Is there a correspondence between the incidence of rape and the number of people with a foreign background in Sweden?
- Is there a correspondence between the incidence of rape and some specific group of immigrants in Sweden?
The answer to both questions was an unequivocal Yes. Twenty-one research reports from the 1960s until today are unanimous in their conclusions: Whether or not they measured by the number of convicted rapists or men suspected of rape, men of foreign extraction were represented far more than Swedes. And this greater representation of persons with a foreign background keeps increasing:
- 1960-1970s – 1.2 to 2.6 times as often as Swedes
- 1980s – 2.1 to 4.7 times as often as Swedes
- 1990s – 2.1 to 8.1 times as often as Swedes
- 2000s – 2.1 to 19.5 times as often as Swedes
Even when adjusted for variables such as age, sex, class and place of residence, the huge discrepancy between immigrants and Swedes remains.
Research reports on crime in Sweden have become a rarity, but among the eighteen that were done during the 1990s and the 2000s, eleven dealt with rape. Two of these reports dealt with the connection between rape and immigration, and they both confirmed that there is a link.
Finally, it’s also worth pointing out that the rise of rape isn’t peculiar to Sweden either. The same problem is plaguing Germany, Austria (more information here), Britain, and other EU nations.
Anyone who points any of this out will likely be labeled a “Nazi.” But recognizing this problem has nothing whatsoever to do with “blood and soil” nationalism—which, along with its totalitarian cousin, communism, is utterly despicable. The problem here is rooted in culture, not blood.
Islam is increasingly hostile to the views that define western liberal democracy. To get some sense of the cultural chasm, read Carlqvist here and watch the videos she has linked (most of which have subtitles). They are chilling.
The author is a professor who teaches at an American university.
