Fact-Check Central

Does Sweden have an immigrant rape crisis?

In other words, the main reason rape is more "prevalent" in Sweden is that they don't make excuses for men like Donald Trump or his bragging about "[grabbing] them by the p***y, " they arrest them!

If Swedish law were implemented in the United States, our rape stats would likely be worse than theirs... and our current ruler would be in prison where he belongs rather than the White House. As for immigrants and Sweden's crime trends, those alleged correlations disappear on closer examination as well. There are several chronically recurring factors in Far-Right xenophobic fake news, but among the more common are scientific and mathematical illiteracy, especially where statistics are involved. For instance, one repeatedly sees videos and alleged eyewitness accounts of isolated incidents from which sweeping generalizations are made, or graphs in which some trend (like crime) is plotted against a single variable such as nationality hailed as "proof" of a direct correlation between the two. A few weeks ago a friend posted the two graphs below in a Facebook comment thread.

The first was said to be from "Mother Jones" and the second from "SCS." No other specifics were given regarding their origins or content, but I was able to trace the first to a Feb. 17, 2017 article in the online edition of Mother Jones (Drum, 2017), and the second to the Swedish Crime Survey (Brå, 2016), which my friend had dubbed "SCS." As he originally posted it neither the ordinate, nor the title of the latter were labeled leaving us to wonder what percentages were even being shown. But even so, I was able to track down the original research behind both for the context and detail that were omitted here. The latter figure as it appears in the original publication is below,

Several things are immediately apparent. First, the long-term regressed trends of the violent crimes shown are almost flat, and if anything trending downward. The few spikes present are easily accounted for by reporting noise and/or socio-economic factors unrelated to immigrant status. In particular, the 2015 spike in rape was almost certainly a result of the fact that the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention reclassified reporting of sexual offences that year to broaden the definition of rape (Valverde, 2017). It would be surprising if there wasn't a resulting spike, even if the number of actual crimes remained unchanged. Comparison of these trends with Sweden's immigration records (Wikipedia, 2017) reveals no discernable correlation whatsoever between the two.

But what about the first figure? Doesn't it show that immigrants are committing the lion's share of Sweden's violent crimes? The figures shown there are clearly labeled as being for the period of 1997 to 2001--almost a decade before any of the recent immigration waves the Far-Right is intent on blaming immigrants for. In the uncited article my friend borrowed it from we find the following directly above it,

"Sure enough... He linked to an old report that tallies crime rates for the years 1997-2001—which is all but useless in 2017…" (Drum, 2017 - My emphasis)

It seems my friend conveniently overlooked the "useless in 2017" part in his own source before sharing it. A check of the original source Drum obtained both figures from (Martens & Holmberg, 2005) reveals the following,