Since the beginning of 2019, the Swedish city of Uppsala has prosecuted 23 people, all men, for soliciting prostitutes and the statistics reveal that 78 per cent are foreign-born.
Stina Holmberg, who works at the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Bra), stated that she was not surprised that foreigners were over-represented in cases of soliciting prostitutes in the city.
“If you look at suspects of crimes in Sweden, it is about twice as common that people born abroad are suspected of crimes. So you don’t know if these figures really reflect an actual over-representation when it comes to buying sex,” Holberg said.
According to a report from Nyheter Idag, Sweden’s Equality Minister Åsa Lindhagen — a member os the Green Party (MP) — expressed little concern that migrants were vastly over-represented in the statistics claiming that the common factor was that all those accused were men.
“It is very important that we constantly work with norms and values, both for people who were born in Sweden and also people who we welcome here. But what unites those who buy sex, it’s that they are men and that they have a bad view of women,” Lindhagen said.
While Sweden is well-known as a progressive liberal country on many issues, the country has an unusually dim view of prostitution and the current government has made it clear that it fully intends to fight both prostitution as well as people trafficking activities linked to it.
“There are forces arguing for the legalisation of prostitution. But regardless of whether it is legal or not, prostitution always means that vulnerable people are forced to live under inhumane conditions,” an opinion article co-authored by former Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström stated last year.
“That’s why France and Sweden have a clear position of rejecting any notion of prostitution as a form of work. We do not accept, and will fight the use of, the term ‘sex work’,” the article added.
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