Newly released statistics from the Finnish Police University College show that foreigners account for as many as 37 per cent of suspects in sexual offence cases in metropolitan areas despite making up only 10 percent of the population.
Police also noted that a third of all the foreigners who were suspected of committing sexual offences in major cities were Iraqis, Finnish national broadcaster Yleisradio Oy reports.
Tuija Hietaniemi, Special Investigator at the Central Criminal Police, blamed the fact that many of the Iraqis were young men, saying: “For me, there are several different reasons. There are many young men among the Iraqis, and young men generally also commit the most crime. The same goes for Finns.”
“That’s a big part of the explanation. In the Autumn of 2015 many Iraqis came to Finland, which consisted of a large proportion of young men.”
Psychologist Nina Nurminen said that the number of sex attack cases could be far greater as many are not reported to the police. She argued that cultural differences could explain the high representation of Iraqis as different cultures have different views of the sexual self-determination of women.
“The perpetrators find it difficult to feel empathy and to sit in the victim’s position. If a person is raised in a country where violence and killing is part of weekdays, it can affect the person’s empathy development. Experiences of trauma can again lead to the person repeating trauma by being violent himself,” she said.
Finland is not the only country in which migrants are over-represented in sex attack cases. In Austria, migrants accounted for almost half of the sex attack suspects between 2015 and 2016.
In Germany, the rate of migrant suspects in sex crimes has also increased. In Bavaria, the number went up by 91 per cent between January and July of 2017 and in Baden-Wurttemberg migrant sex attacks almost doubled from 2015 to 2016.