Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said on Wednesday (January 13) that anyone found guilty of sexual assault should be punished, after allegations of a police cover-up.
On Monday (January 11), Swedish police ordered an investigation into allegations that officers covered up accusations of sexual assault by mostly migrant youths at a music festival in Stockholm.
The announcement was made after internal police reports published in Swedish media said around 50 suspects carried out sexual assaults against teenage girls at the “We are Sthlm” youth festival last August. Assaults also occurred in 2014 at the same festival, which attracts thousands of people.
Swedish media have drawn comparisons to attacks on women in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve that prompted more than 600 criminal complaints with police suspicion resting mostly on asylum seekers.
“Every girl’s body, every woman’s body is her own. Girls and women should be able to move freely outside, also in the evenings and at night, on the metro and in crowded places without fear of assault. And if assaults are committed, when violations happen, then society has to be on the side of the victim. I feel great anger when I read the reports from both Cologne and Stockholm. Those who are guilty have to be punished and I welcome that an investigation will now go to the bottom of what has happened,” Lofven said in an address to parliament, adding that more work had to be done to change attitudes among boys and men.
“It’s not as if sexual harassment has just appeared now. Unfortunately it’s been around forever and many women have experienced it during many, many years, eternally. But if this is a different kind of behaviour that one gathers as a group around a woman, or two woman and subject them to this then we have to analyse that. Why is this? What kind of behaviour is that? But under all circumstances this (behaviour) has to go away because it doesn’t belong with us,” Lofven added.
Quoting internal police reports and police who were there, Dagens Nyheter newspaper painted a picture of sexual assaults at the festival, which had escalated in 2014 and more so in 2015, committed mostly by young Afghans.
According to police documents seen by Reuters, in 2015, police received 20 complaints of sexual crimes – 14 of which concerned girls under the age of 15 – in the area during the festival. In 2014 there were 18 complaints.
There was no mention of the ethnicity of the perpetrators in the files, and a police spokesman could not immediately provide a figure of how many of the cases had been prosecuted.
Police at the time described the 2015 event as one with “relatively few crimes”.
However, some officials said the police force was concerned that assault reports could have boosted the far right.
Sweden faces a backlash among many voters after a record 163,000 asylum seekers arrived last year, part of a wave of immigration that has seen the far-right Sweden Democrats become one of the country’s biggest political parties.
This year the centre-left government has tightened border controls with identity checks on the main border crossing with Denmark after concerns authorities were unable to cope with the influx of refugees. (Reuters)