After Two Years, Swedish Child Marriage Law Sees Just Two Prosecutions

After being in force for two years, Sweden’s laws against child marriage have only seen two prosecutions. Prosecutors claim they have incredible difficulty in proving their cases.

Since July of 2020, Sweden has tightened its law on child marriage to allow for the prosecution of parents who allow their children to enter into any such relationship, even if there was supposedly no coercion of the child.

However, only two cases in the two years since have been prosecuted, despite 87 cases being reported to Swedish authorities last year alone, per statistics from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, broadcaster SVT reports.

The lack of prosecutions has been blamed on the difficulty for prosecutors to prove the cases, particularly as the parents and often the children themselves refuse to discuss the matter with investigators.

Another issue with prosecuting child marriages is that many of them occur overseas and not in Sweden itself. Last year, Sabina Landstedt, a support coordinator at the honour culture organisation GAPF (Never Forget Pela and Fadime), explained that children as young as 15 were being flown out of Sweden and forced into marriage overseas.

“These girls who have contacted us are between 15 and 22 years old. They have been abducted because they do not follow the family’s standards for how to behave and in their home countries they are subjected to child or forced marriages,” Landstedt said.

Prosecutor Carolin Roos in Örebro brought child marriage charges against two sets of parents of two children earlier this month — only the second such prosecution since July of 2020.

According to Roos, the evidence in the case allowed for the prosecution: “In terms of evidence, there is objective evidence, I think, that supports the fact that these children entered into a marriage-like relationship.”

The trial for the two sets of parents starts on October 17th.

 

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.