The Far-Right’s Reinterpretation of Sexual Assaults in Sweden

The post-lunch session at AoIR 2023 starts with a panel on the far right, and I’ll be slightly distracted as I’m also keeping an eye on the second half of the Hannover 96 – FC Magdeburg match, but let’s see how we go. We’re starting with Mathilda Åkerlund, whose interest is in the racialisation of sexual assault reports from Sweden by the US far-right.

Sweden has losing had a very positive international image, and ranks highly globally in quality of life, social welfare, and other indices – yet the international far right has attempted to reconfigure this image to claim that Sweden is ‘the rape capital of the world’, and that such sexual assaults are predominantly committed by Muslim migrants. Mathilda’s work began with known far-right sites and explored their discussion of rape in Sweden, following the links they provided in support of their claims through a nine-step snowballing process.

This shows a growth in such claims since the mid-2000s. Most texts are from far-right blogs and social media sites; they refer also to mainstream media reporting, government texts, conservative media content, and academic texts, but the citation practices are very clearly driven by far-right sites. Mainstream media sites don’t tend to identify ethnicity and race of assailants, so those details are being added during the far-right citations; the far-right sites also engage in the aggregate disinformation and misrepresentation of collections of reports and statistics, enhanced further with pseudo-statistics from highly questionable sources.

Such biased data collections are then presented as reliable, official statistics from Sweden, and as sites cite each other this perception of reliability is further cemented. Such reporting is also presented as covering current statistics when in reality the material being cited is often more than a year old already. Some far-right influencers, and some key cases, appear as especially important sources in this context; their articles are cited repeatedly in subsequent reporting.

Much of this is wrapped up with white supremacism, as rapes of white women by non-white migrants are being positioned as threats to whiteness itself. The threat to the Swedish woman’s body becomes a threat to the imagined global nation of whiteness itself. This is also often represented in very graphical depictions; and in such depictions rape is also positioned as a new phenomenon which had not existed in Sweden prior to Muslim immigration (even in spite of the well-known use of rape particularly by Vikings in Sweden’s own history).