A police officer stands guard in Stockholm. AFP PHOTO/JONATHAN NACKSTRAND (Photo credit should read JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images)

Was the 2015 European migration crisis followed by a surge in sex crime and sexual harassment? It’s a delicate question; one that many people would prefer not to be asked, much less answered.
But as a result of this collective reticence, discussion surrounding this issue has often been isolated to two extremes. On the one hand, it has been dominated by the populist Right. In response to the Cologne sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve 2015-16, for example, German supporters of Alternative für Deutschland rioted and called for mass deportations. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the response of many European liberals and progressives has been that of the three wise monkeys: “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”
But why should this debate be restricted to these two extremes? Surely good social science requires that rigorous empirical research can be carried out on complex phenomena, particularly when it is controversial and politically sensitive. After all, only then can they be better understood, and public policy measures be appropriately formulated and targeted.
When carrying out research for my new book Prey, I was constantly frustrated by the lack of reliable data on almost every aspect of the problematic relationship between mass migration and sexual violence. Statistics were either a tangle of changing definitions of “sexual assault” or — in the case of a number of countries, including Sweden — they weren’t available at all.
That has now changed thanks to the work of the social scientists Ardavan Khoshnood, Henrik Ohlsson, Jan Sundquist and Kristina Sundquist. In a recent issue of the journal Forensic Sciences Research, they published a paper on “Swedish rape offenders”, in which they analyse the characteristics of individuals between 15-60 years old who were convicted of “rape+” against women in Sweden between 2000 and 2015. The term “rape+” here refers to both acts of rape and attempted rape, including aggravated cases.
The researchers found that, within that time-frame, a total of 3,039 offenders were convicted of rape+ against a woman in Sweden — nearly all of whom (99.7%) were men. According to the researchers, Swedish-born offenders with Swedish-born parents accounted for 40.8% of the offenders. But, strikingly, almost half of the offenders were born outside of Sweden (47.7%). Of those foreign-born offenders, 34.5% were from the Middle East/North Africa, with 19.1% hailing from the rest of Africa. As a percentage of all convicted perpetrators, therefore, 16.4% were foreign-born individuals from the Middle East/North Africa, and 9.1% were foreign-born individuals from Africa (excluding North Africa).
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