Fact-Check Central

Does Sweden have an immigrant rape crisis?

There's no evidence the model is even Swedish, much less actually abused. It's more likely she's an aspiring starlet with a good make-up artist, and a regular at Malibu Beach.

The Fox segment Trump referred to was an even bigger spectacle. In it Tucker Carlson interviews Ami Horowitz, a media personality and film-maker who recently completed a short documentary alleging that "rape and violence has exploded across Sweden due it's immigration policies." During the interview Horowitz made numerous statements that within days were debunked as unsubstantiated rumors or outright falsehoods (Aftonbladet, 2017; Baker & Chan, 2017; Chan, 2017; Farley, 2017). The documentary not only repeated these falsehoods, but contained numerous edits that appear to have been deliberately misleading. For instance, its first 20 seconds include a slow pan across a BBC headline ("Sweden's rape rate under the spotlight") but conspicuously avoids the article's content. However the title, author, and date (briefly visible) are enough for a Google search of the original article (Alexander, 2012) where we find the accompanying byline;

"The Julian Assange extradition case has put Sweden's relatively high incidence of rape under the spotlight. But can such statistics be reliably compared from one country to another?" [My emphasis]

The article goes on from there to explain in depth why they can't. "In the spotlight" was merely a rhetorical device to pique readers' interest, but Horowitz would have us believe it was an indictment. When I first pulled the article up, this byline appeared on my screen barely an inch below the portion scanned in the documentary, and in bold print. Compare the portion of the article the documentary pans across,

with this highlighted screenshot from the original,

No reasonable person could've missed the article's message or content, unless the intent was to deliberately mislead the audience. Soon after the documentary's release two policemen who were interviewed in it accused Horowitz of deliberately editing their comments to misrepresent their statements and called him a "madman." A review of the final edits by the documentary's cameramen confirmed their claims (Lindkvist, 2017; 2017b). Horowitz denies all of this of course, but as of this writing he still refuses to provide the original raw footage for comparison (Lindkvist, 2017c). Horowitz also claims to have been beaten by a "gang of immigrants" while filming for the documentary in Stockholm's Husby district (Robinson, 2016). But not surprisingly, there's no actual footage of the alleged attack--only a blank screen with audio and a few words of what is claimed to be "Arabic." And of course, Horowitz emerged from this traumatic ordeal with no apparent injuries. To date, no independent evidence whatsoever suggests the attack wasn't staged, or if it did happen, that the assailants were actually Muslim immigrants.

Needless to say, these shenanigans only increased the documentary's popularity on social media and in the usual Far-Right tabloids.

Shenanigans aside, here's what actually is true. Sweden does have the highest number of registered rape offenses in Europe, and has so for some time (UNODC, 2013; Brå, 2016). But a number of statistical, substantive, and legal factors render the differences almost meaningless. First, in Sweden crimes are registered when they are first reported, before their true classifications have been verified. As such, and act first registered as rape will retain that classification in published crime statistics even if it ends up being reclassified or charges are later dropped. Furthermore, rape charges are also handled in a substantively different manner than elsewhere. In the United States for instance, a man who assault his wife or girlfriend, say, 20 times might be given a single rape charge, whereas in Sweden he wuld be charges with 20 rapes. Second, even by First World standards Sweden is an overtly feminist society and their laws and social norms are correspondingly more liberal. In Sweden, the definition of rape includes groping, and there are fewer social stigmas associated with reporting it. Here in the United States a significant number of sexual assaults go unreported because of the shame attached to them. Rape victims are often accused of being "slutty" behavior that somehow led their attackers on, and are considered "soiled" by it. The Swedes have little patience for such excuses, or for "locker room banter" about sexual assault of any kind--to them, "no" damn well means NO! As such, rape tends to be overreported in Sweden compared to other First World nations (Von Hofer, 2000; Brå, 2017).