A review of 32 gang rape cases by a Swedish tabloid has revealed almost every man convicted of gang rape in Sweden during 2016 and 2017 has a migrant background, a full year after Breitbart London originally reported the statistic.
Researchers at Swedish tabloid Expressen found that 32 of the 43 men sentenced for gang rape are immigrants, with eight born in Sweden to parents who were both born abroad.
A further two of the offenders were born in Sweden to one immigrant and one Sweden-born parent with just one born in Sweden to parents who were both born in Sweden.
Finding that perpetrators were on average 21 years old when they committed the gang rape, with 13 of the offenders aged under 18, the investigation also revealed that 14 of the 43 men — or roughly a third — had been convicted of previous crimes in Sweden.
With regards to penalties, Expressen found that 29 of the men were jailed, receiving three-year terms on average, but in some cases, additional crimes were factored into their sentencing. A further two were sentenced to carry out community service.
Ten were sentenced to “youth care”, a so-called sanction in the Swedish legal system which involves referring young offenders to social services, which develop a “care plan” intended to turn youths away from crime.
A further two were required to carry out “youth service”, a sentence of unpaid work that can be given as an alternative to prison for criminals between the ages of 15 and 21.
The tabloid reported 15 offenders, all of whom were born abroad and lacked the right to reside in Sweden, were sentenced to deportation.
The Expressen report comes a full year after Breitbart London reported on gang rape crime data, collected by a Swedish citizen who wished to remain anonymous, through freedom of information requests.
The site, Gang Rape Sweden, was taken down by Swedish authorities in December after publishing a massive data leak of criminal information that was believed to be in violation of the county’s Personal Data Act.
Other sites, like the legal search engine Lexbase, also came under fire from the government for allowing access to criminal data that could allow individuals to map out migrant crime statistics or ethnic background data of criminals. The Swedish government promised to censor the site so that it would only be accessible to lawyers, journalists, and other professionals in the future.
Stina Holmberg, a researcher at the National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), said in relation to the new Expressen report that the figures were unsurprising, stating: “In our study in 2005, it was five times more common to be suspected of rape as a foreigner compared to the one born in Sweden with two Swedish parents.”
“It is obviously more common among young immigrant boys, but it is only a vanishingly small proportion of immigrants who commit this type of crime”, she told Expressen, adding that the gang rape figures are tiny in relation to the 163,000 people who applied for asylum in 2015.
While the last time Brå carried out a report on immigration and crime was 2005, Holmberg said she rejects calls for a new study, asserting that: “The important thing is to get started early on integration work so as to get young guys who are newly arriving in Sweden familiar with how our society looks and works.”