Stockholm
On New Year’s Eve 2015, more than 600 women and girls were victims of sexual assault at the Cologne Central Station—the worst mass sexual attack in peacetime Europe. A massive effort by the German police prevented comparable chaos this past New Year’s Eve.
Similar abuse was reported in Sweden a year ago, albeit on a smaller scale. In Kalmar, for instance, more than 30 women reported that they had been surrounded and sexually assaulted by groups of men. As in Cologne, the recurrence of such attacks seems to have been prevented this December 31, although the police effort was much smaller than in Germany—92 police officers were on patrol in the Swedish capital of Stockholm, compared with an extra 1,700 in Berlin.
How was it possible that such small forces in Sweden prevented a repeat of last year’s calamity?
One answer could be that Swedish women simply took extra precautions. According to Kalmar police, there were unusually few women and girls at the New Year’s celebration in the town square this year. The contrast reflects a profound difference in how Germany and Sweden—the two countries in Europe that have received the highest number of asylum seekers in recent years—manage crime related to asylum immigration, specifically large-scale sexual harassment.
This New Year’s Eve in Cologne, about 1,500 police officers were assigned to the streets, more than 10 times the number in 2015. Large groups of North African males were held up and registered at the square where most attacks took place last year, after police received reports of “highly aggressive” men on trains bound for the city center. Passengers that fit the profile of the previous year’s offenders were questioned and registered. Anyone without valid identification was made to leave or taken into custody.
Unsurprisingly, the strategy has sparked a debate on racial profiling in Germany. Cologne’s chief of police, Jürgen Mathies, stressed that the actions were based on very distinct profiling after last year’s events, in accordance with traditional police work, and that they had nothing to do with racism. The chairman of the Federal German Police Union, Ernst Walter, argued strongly that last year’s atrocities likely would have recurred without the strategy of prevention:
This kind of straight talk from Swedish police, or any Swedish authority, is unthinkable. Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven proudly claims that he runs the world’s first “feminist cabinet.” (Sorry, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.) Still, it has yet to protect women’s right to move freely in public spaces.
The attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015 affected Sweden in an unexpected way. When Swedish media reported that the overwhelming number of suspects in Germany were migrants, it was a break with established guidelines: Unlike in Germany, media in Sweden only rarely report the ethnicity of suspected or even convicted criminals.
After the events in Cologne, that changed and news stories of similar incidents suddenly surged; group attacks against women were reported not only from New Year’s celebrations, but also from Swedish swim centers and music festivals.
In early January 2016, Eriksdalsbadet, Stockholm’s main swim center, decided to separate men and women in jacuzzis as a consequence of sexual harassment by “unaccompanied minors”—a group consisting mainly of Afghan males who seek asylum in Sweden as minors but are often older. Police also had to be called in to patrol the center.
Less than two weeks after the Cologne attacks, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter revealed that there had been similar abuse at the summer music festival We Are Stockholm in August the previous two years. Numerous young men, again mainly “unaccompanied minors,” surrounded and attacked young girls—a modus operandi described by the organizers as a shocking “new phenomenon.” In 2015, police made 200 suspects leave the festival area.
After the news reports, a district police chief in Stockholm, Peter Ågren, admitted in a now-notorious statement that the incidents were covered up out of fear of “playing into the hands of the Sweden Democrats”—the country’s anti-immigration party. Similarly, Sweden’s national chief of police, Dan Eliasson, told German magazine Der Spiegel: “But we did not go public—at the time the topic did not have the status that it got after the events of Cologne.“
While both police and the city authorities of Stockholm knew of the attacks, they allowed them to continue for two years with no warning to the teenagers at the festivals or their parents.
This is not the only time Swedish authorities have exhibited a curious lack of interest in crime against women by immigrant males. In January 2016, a Swedish-Lebanese employee at an asylum center for unaccompanied minors, 22-year-old Alexandra Mezher, was stabbed to death by an adult man seeking asylum as a minor. When asked on Swedish public television about the murder, Eliasson answered:
Later, Eliasson expressed regret over his response and its focus on the perpetrator, but it didn’t take long until he again showed his unwillingness to take violence against women seriously. In advance of last summer’s pop festivals, Swedish police took a number of precautions. An unusually large number of police officers were assigned to We Are Stockholm in August, and for the first time surveillance cameras were put to use.
The one action that caught everyone’s attention, however, was the distribution by the police of rubber wristbands with the words “Don’t grope.” Eliasson explained this in an interview: “We wanted to make guys aware, that this [groping] is a crime. In plain Swedish, Don’t do this kind of crap.”
The wristbands sparked a fierce debate in Sweden, and Eliasson was accused of turning a serious issue into a PR stunt, rather than combating it with traditional police methods. Jimmie Åkesson, chairman of the antiestablishment Sweden Democrats, brought a prop with him on stage during a speech in July: “There is only one kind of wristband that works against sex offenders,” he said, showing the audience a pair of handcuffs.
This month, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, a government agency, reported what it called “alarming” new figures: The number of women who state that they have been victims of sex crimes more than doubled from 2012 to 2015, from 1.4 percent to 3 percent of the female population. Thirty-one percent of Swedish women report feeling insecure or afraid in their own neghborhoods in the evening—an increase of 25 percent from 2015. Twelve percent stay in at night out of fear of being assaulted.
Last March, staff reported that fewer women and girls now visit the Eriksdalsbadet swim center. As in Kalmar, girls and women seem to take new precautions in public arenas.
The rise in women’s insecurity is the highest recorded by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention since its surveys were introduced in 2006. But at least their country boasts a feminist government. ¨
Paulina Neuding is a columnist with the Swedish center-right daily Svenska Dagbladet.
