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On 18 February 2017, U.S. president Donald Trump drew international attention for comments during a rally in Florida in which he argued that accepting refugees from war-torn regions like Syria would make the United States less safe. To make his point, President Trump claimed that the night before, asylum seekers had done something terrible in Sweden (a country that had taken in roughly 193,000 asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016): Bewildered Swedes took to social media to express confusion about what Trump may have meant, sparking the ironic Twitter hashtag #LastNightInSweden: The trolling predictably prompted Trump's supporters to seek out evidence of migrant-linked crime in Sweden. Suddenly the small Scandinavian country of 10 million people became a political proxy in the American debate over immigration and asylum policies. Trump later clarified that he wasn't referring to a specific incident but a segment he had seen on Fox News about Sweden's migrants and crime. Partisan media outlets have been quick to select their own truths, with liberal publications celebrating that the president had been proved wrong because nothing happens in peaceful and egalitarian Sweden, and conservative ones rushing to prove Trump right by presenting reports of crime and violence they linked to the refugee crisis that began in 2015. We sent our reporter, Bethania Palma, to Sweden to research both sides' claims. What follows is Part I of a three-part series on migration and crime in Sweden. Is rape on the rise in Sweden due to an influx of refugees in 2015? On 20 February 2017, British politician Nigel Farage claimed that the Swedish city of Malmö is the rape capital of Europe – or maybe even the world. The municipality in southwest Sweden is home to communities populated by immigrants and is often cited in media reports as an area of high crime: Farage's sensational comments grabbed headlines, but later sparked a probe by Great Britain’s broadcasting standards watchdog Ofcom, whose spokesperson told reporters: Farage echoed the rhetoric of the Sweden Democrats, a political party that has risen in influence by marshaling fear of asylum seekers and advocating for strict immigration policies. Critics like the Sweden Democrats suspect that the government is colluding with the mainstream media to hide damning statistics of a supposed rape epidemic. Statistical evidence shows that rape in Sweden is not on the rise. Reported cases have remained steady for almost a decade. But egregious cases have sharpened the narrative and raised people's fears. In one January 2017 incident, three men, two of whom are from Afghanistan, reportedly livestreamed the gang rape of a Swedish woman in Uppsala, a city north of Stockholm. The trial began on 24 March 2017, with the accused men denying charges that they raped the woman. The strategy of playing on such fears seems to be working for the Sweden Democrats, which Reuters reports has grown in influence and parliamentary power. Author and historian Johan Norberg told us in an e-mail that the party’s rhetoric has created a feedback loop, reinforcing the impression of a refugee-related crime wave in Sweden: In an e-mail, Yasmine Eriksson, Sweden Democrats’ press secretary, told us the party wants to reduce immigration and act as the voice of people who refuse to let the government and mainstream media present a false image of our country: She also sent a graph from Sweden's annual crime survey to prove that sexual assault is skyrocketing in Sweden. However, a closer examination reveals that, like Farage’s comments, the claim is misleading for a number of reasons. First of all, the graph does not just represent rape, but a wide category called sexual crimes. Sweden's National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet, usually shortened to its Swedish acronym Brå), which produced the graph, explained in their report: While Brå noted that the broad category of sexual crimes had increased since 2012, the same was not true for rape. Another Brå graph shows that reported cases of rape (represented by the purple line below) did not spike suddenly after the influx of refugees in 2015 - instead, they dropped from 6,697 in 2014 to 5,918 in 2015 (about the same amount as in 2009). Preliminary statistics for 2016 show an increase of reported rapes to 6,570, a 13 percent rise over 2015 (but still lower than 2014), according to Brå. While the graph does seem to indicate a general upward trend in rape since 2005, the numbers do not tell the whole story. Brå notes in both 2005 and 2013, Sweden broadened its definition of rape, contributing to the apparent upward trend: Just as there's no evidence supporting the claim that newly-arrived refugees have caused an increase in sexual crimes in Sweden, there's also no proof that the city of Malmö is a rape capital of Europe (or the world). According to Brå, 60 rapes were reported in Malmö in 2015, while 55 were reported in Gothenburg and 67 in Stockholm. Preliminary figures for 2016 suggest that Gotheburg had more reported rapes with 69 cases. Malmö had 67 and Stockholm at 65. In the table below, figures for Gothenberg, Malmö and Stockholm are represented in top-to-bottom order. As the BBC reported, there hasn't been an incline in reported rape cases in Malmö coinciding with the 2015 refugee crisis: Are there more sexual crimes in Sweden than other European countries? The idea that sexual crimes in Sweden are rising isn't limited to partisan media. On 8 February 2017, the mainstream American publication USA Today made a claim similar to Farage's comments: But, again, this apparent disparity may have less to do with the amount of rape in each country, and more to do with a difference in how each country defines and records rape. For one thing, Sweden tallies each incident as a separate case, even if the accusation, perpetrator and victim are the same, a practice that may create confusion on an international level. Crimes are also counted at the point of contact with police, not when convictions are made. This could make the level of crime appear higher than it is when viewing raw data without qualifying information. Brå researcher Johanna Olseryd told us: Also, Sweden has a broader definition of rape than some of its European neighbors. Until recently in Germany, for example, the victim having said no to a sexual act was not always enough to meet the legal definition of rape. Kristine Eck, a researcher at Uppsala University, argued in a February 2017 Washington Post op-ed that because Sweden is particularly thorough in recording and publicly reporting crime, it may lead to the false impression that crime is higher there than elsewhere. There is simply no data to show that Sweden is the rape capital of Europe, or even that rape is on the rise in the country.
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