If you think there is a bias in reporting then consider this: Sweden is the most leftist and feminist country there is, with the broadest definition of rape and the strongest protection of women's rights. Given that, don't you suppose that any bias would be in favor of women?
If you're talking about "No Go Zones" in Sweden (your last sentence) - you do realize that is a myth?
In fact women in Sweden are talking about 'getting used' to the new rules, some even change their clothing and cover their blond hair to be less seen. What protection are you talking about?
How much is hearsay and how much is factual? There is a lot of hearsay - but it doesn't seem supported by actual data.
How much do you rely on hearsay normally?
Do you have any actual evidence that there is a bias in crime stat reporting going on in Sweden, the world's most feminist country?
PM says police report’s failure to mention incidents at 2014 event amounts to ‘double betrayal’, while reports emerge on New Year’s Eve attacks in Malmö
Interesting article...sounds, on one hand - very political, with each side making different claims and claims, still be substantiated, that it was covered up.. In the end - 2015 music festival, there were 15-20 claims of harrassment (note - no rape claims) in an event of over 170,000 teens. It is also interesting to note this:
During the 2014 festival, organisers picked up on rumours of a new phenomenon, said Roger Ticoalu, head of events at the Stockholm city administration.
“It was a modus operandi that we had never seen before: large groups of young men who surround girls and molest them,” Ticoalu said. “In the cases where we were able to apprehend suspects, they were with a foreign background, newly arrived refugees aged 17-20, who had come to Sweden without their families.”
He said festival organisers did not have enough facts at the time to say anything definitive, and it would have been “totally irresponsible on our side to make anything public”. After the festival the organisers launched a programme with police and NGOs to encourage girls and young women to report harassment and to identify culprits, he said.
Susanna Udvardi, director of the South-east Skåne Women’s Shelter, who has also led volunteer efforts to help refugees integrate in southern Sweden, said: “Vulgar and demeaning treatment of women, including serious harassment, is far from the preserve of immigrant men from the Middle East.
A spokesperson for the festival organisers, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “We have seen different waves of this sort of violence over time. Sexual harassment is something that happens in society, so everything that is happening in society will definitely happen there.”
The number of reports of harassment in 2015, around 15, had to be viewed in the context of 170,000 people each day in an open access area with no control over people coming and going. “Of course it was serious: 15 cases is still too many, but it is also not very much,” Gyllander said.
Question is - does this support the claim of "rape epidemics"?
Other points of interest - the culprits, those arrested or identified, seem to mostly belong to refugees classified as unaccompanied minors - youths who arrived without their parents. That's a volatile group regardless.
Swedish police accused of covering up sex attacks by refugees at music festival
Responding to the January incident in an editorial published by the Swedish magazine Mänsklig Säkerhet, Martina Lindberg, a former lecturer on women, peace, and security matters at Stockholm's Swedish Defense University, notes a skewed gender imbalance among asylum seekers in Sweden, with an estimated two-thirds of refugees being male. However, she argues that while the Swedish government should acknowledge this imbalance and adapt appropriate integration measures, it should not allow individual sex crimes to form what she calls "the basis for a simplified approach to the asylum-seeking man."
"Violence against women in the public sphere has been more or less constant in recent years," she wrote. "It seems as if the debate today depends more on who is assumed to be the perpetrator."
Indeed, according to official statistics on file with The Swedish Crime Survey, the sexual violence rate in Sweden has remained about the same between 2005 and 2014. In fact, it actually decreased by .3 percent between 2013 and 2014. That said, the country has the highest rate of rape in Europe, a statistic that has been partially attributed to both Swedish law, wherein rape is given a wider definition than in other countries, as well as a higher tendency among women to report the crimes to the police.
"It is much more complicated than the way the media are normally presenting it," Jerzy Sarnecki, a professor of criminology at Stockholm University, told The Daily Beast. "According to studies which I have done on general crime, most of the differences in recorded crimes between immigrants and Swedes are explained by socioeconomic factors. It doesn't mean of course, that one, a few, or several other incidents of that kind [sexual assaults perpetuated by immigrants] didn't happen. "
The xenophobic fear of the "other" is not limited to Sweden, certainly. In the United States, presumed Republican nominee Donald Trump made headlines around the world after describing Mexican immigrants as "rapists."
"One of the ghosts of all kinds of racial prejudices is allegations of sexual crimes against women," Sarnecki said, noting that in the 19th and 20th centuries many African-American men were executed based on (often unproven) allegations of raping white women. "It's an old, very well-used argument against immigrants."
