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From Top Conservative News:

Muslim immigrants raped over 300 Swedish children in seven months of 2013 In the first seven months of 2013, over 1,000 Swedish women reported being raped by Muslim immigrants. Over 300 of those were under the age of 15. The number of rapes is up 16% compared to 2012 numbers.

They cite Swedish Public Radio.

Is this really true or just some anti muslim rant?

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  • 2
    Another article repeating similar claims about this subject: gatestoneinstitute.org/4041/european-anti-semitism-muslims
    – Andrew Grimm
    Dec 16, 2013 at 12:31
  • I rolled back the last edit, that is a different question you added that should be in a separate post with a different, appropriate source for notability
    – Mad Scientist ♦
    Dec 22, 2013 at 13:38
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    As public media have a code of honour to not needlessly publish things like ethnicity and religion of suspected criminals their claim of source is obviously false.
    – liftarn
    Sep 8, 2014 at 13:39
  • 7
    Do rape victims get to ask their attackers about their religion?
    – RedSonja
    Sep 16, 2015 at 8:24

4 Answers 4

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There are two relevant differences between the "Top Conservative News" summary and the actual report from Swedish Radio, to which they are linking:

  • The Swedish Radio report does not mention the ethnicity of the perpetrator. Since the report refers to the number of police reports and not actual convictions, the perpetrator is likely to be unknown in several cases.

  • The Swedish Radio report only counts the number of reports in Stockholm County. The "Top Conservative News" summary seem to indicate that the numbers are for the whole country.

If we look at the statistics from "Brottsförebyggande rådet" (BRÅ), the actual number for the entire country are as expected quite a bit higher. In the first 7 months of 2013, there were in total 3,426 reports on rape or rape attempt. In 1,133 cases, the victim was below the age of 15 (1,004 girls and 129 boys).

The most recent statistics on crime among immigrants seem to be this report from BRÅ, dated 2005. The report does not quote any absolute numbers, but on page 42, the relative risk of being accused for different kind of crimes is listed for the three categories "born in Sweden, both parents born in Sweden", "born in Sweden, at least one parent born outside Sweden" and "born outside Sweden". For rape and rape attempts, the relative risks for these three categories are 1.0, 1.8 and 5.0.

Now, looking to find the percentage of the total population falling into each of these three groups, "Statistiska centralbyrån" offers the numbers for the year 2008:

  • Born in Sweden, both parents born in Sweden: 75%
  • Born in Sweden, at least one parent born abroad: 11%
  • Born abroad: 14%

With the known risk of correlating three different statistics collected over a range of 8 years, the number of perpetrators in each of the three population groups (considering their share of the total population and relative crime risk) should be approximately:

  • Born in Sweden, both parents born in Sweden: 1557
  • Born in Sweden, at least one parent born abroad: 415
  • Born abroad: 1454

Summing it up: Of the 3,426 reported rapes or rape attempts in the first 7 months of 2013, some 1900 can be assumed to have been performed by a perpetrator born outside Sweden or with at least one parent born outside Sweden.

This is where it seems impossible to get any further with the analysis. There are no public statistics regarding the religion of the foreign-born population and also no crime statistics with a more detailed breakdown of the nationality or religion of the crime suspects. Even if the Swedish Radio news report is misquoted and there are no further backups for the claim, it is not completely unrealistic, that 1000 of the assumed 1900 foreign rapists are Muslims.

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    It seems to me that the salient point is that the linked post, which is just a few sentences long, broadly misrepresents the original Swedish report. If the linked site cannot be trusted to do even sentence-level translation with some integrity, the statistical feasibility of that site's hypotheses are hardly worth wasting time on.
    – Larry OBrien
    Dec 17, 2013 at 22:50
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    The statistical analysis does not take into account that a large majority of rape happens within the family and therefore the likelihood that a foreigner rapes a Swede is much lower than the likelihood that they rape someone of the same ethnicity.
    – Sklivvz
    Dec 18, 2013 at 9:30
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    @jwenting: I tried to state that with the last paragraph. The only publicly available statistic does however only break down the perpetrators into the three mentioned groups, depending on if the perpetrator or its parent is born in Sweden or not.
    – Tor-Einar Jarnbjo
    Dec 20, 2013 at 8:29
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    With Stockholm being 1/9th of the population of Sweden, together with immigrants not being unusually concentrated there (vaestoliitto-fi-bin.directo.fi/@Bin/…) and without reason to believe stockholm immigrants are particularly prone to rape over their counterparts elsewhere. It seems to require quite a bit of handwaving to believe that 700 out of those assumed 1900 foreign-born incidents would be just for Stockholm.
    – Kit Sunde
    Dec 27, 2013 at 9:10
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    A non-political point of clarification. You're using a statistic which you have translated as "the relative risk of being accused for different kind of crimes" to estimate this statistic: "1900 can be assumed to have been performed by a perpetrator born outside Sweden or with at least one parent born outside Sweden". In addition, the English summary uses the phrase "registered as crime suspects". I would recommend editing this answer to indicate that foreign born persons are more likely to be suspected of a crime, rather than to have commited a crime.
    – De Novo
    Oct 1, 2018 at 17:38
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The Top Conservative News web-site provides a reference from an article from Swedish Public Rado.

Using my rather rusty Swedish, confirmed by Google Translate, the original source makes NO mention of the religion of the perpetrators. The anti-Muslim slur has been added by Top Conservative News.

It says there were 300 reports of rapes of girls under 15 in the first seven months of 2013. Given the percentage of Muslims is estimated 1.8-4.4% (let alone Muslim immigrants), it is fanciful to assume that they are responsible for 300 rapes in that time.

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    @ChrisW: I think the claim is not merely UNSUPPORTED by the cited claim, it is CONTRADICTED. For it to be true, 100% of all rape reports (of girls under 15) would have to be solved crimes, with convictions against no-one but Muslims immigrants, while Swedish citizens (Muslim or otherwise) accounting for well over 95% of the population, either never committed child rape at all or never had their rapes reported. I submit that this is self-evidently absurd, and not in need of a specific reference.
    – Oddthinking ♦
    Dec 16, 2013 at 10:57
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    @Will Ness: I do not assume that the rape rates amongst the two populations are the same, or even close. I do assume it is not 100% versus 0%. I'm having trouble seeing that as unreasonable, especially when the relative population sizes are so biased in the other direction (which I do reference).
    – Oddthinking ♦
    Dec 17, 2013 at 1:44
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    @WillNess: I repeat I make no claim that it is the same as the population proportion. Immigrants tend to be poor, refugees have been oppressed, Muslims are discriminated against and I can anecdotally attest there are challenges being in Sweden and not speaking strong Swedish. Identical crime rates would be astonishing. However, this was not the reasonable claim being asked; the actual claim was fabricated racist hogwash, which was why it fell so quickly.
    – Oddthinking ♦
    Dec 17, 2013 at 8:24
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    It is not an answer from personal incredulity. It demonstrates that the claim has been derived from an invalid source. I feel like the original claim was "Elvis's nickname was 'Chairman of the Board'" and I have said "Err... no, that link explains that that was Sinatra's nickname." and everyone is shouting at me "But that doesn't prove that no-one called Elvis that too!"
    – Oddthinking ♦
    Dec 20, 2013 at 20:12
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    @KonradRudolph That is a materially different argument than the one he makes. If he means that, he should say that. He should also state what priors he is assuming, justified with evidence (such as the evidence from Tor-Einar's answer). He should demonstrate that 300 rapes (or something close to that) makes up the totality of rapes that occurred during the time period, and compute the likelihood of the observation that 300 rapes were committed by Muslims given the selected priors. It seems to me that Tor-Einar's answer establishes that this is not so fanciful or outside of expectation.
    – user5582
    Dec 21, 2013 at 17:55
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Their claim is unsupported by any evidence that I can find.

Their source (http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=103&artikel=5612131) makes no mentions of Muslims or Islam.

This blog post explains this away as:

The official radio report quoted from BRÅ (The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention) refuses to mention the M-word in the socialist-suffocated Sweden, a country held hostage by the extreme left. But when you contact senior police and government sources they confirm (anonymous in fear of losing their jobs) that these numbers represent Muslims.

I would not rely on anonymous sources for a claim of this significance.

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    As well as the fact that the reference doesn't mention Muslims, there's at least one other error in their reference: the referenced statistics are for "Stockholm County" (which, Google Translate helpfully translates as "England"), not for the whole of Sweden.
    – ChrisW
    Dec 20, 2013 at 16:52
  • If you are looking for (any, even tangential) evidence, there are some crime statistics sorted by immigrants versus non-immigrants, in the (Swedish language) references hyperlinked in Tor-Einar Jarnbjo's answer.
    – ChrisW
    Dec 20, 2013 at 16:57
  • Yeah, I had found that evidence, but I considered it unsupporting of the claim (not refuting it, either, though). Tor-Einar's evidence and argument seems sound to me, and does demonstrate plausibility of the claim. Maybe this should just be an addition to Tor-Einar Jarnbjo's answer...
    – user5582
    Dec 20, 2013 at 17:10
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No, it says non-western emigrants, not muslims. Muslims are the vast majority of those but there is no credible source (I could find) on whether the rapists were muslim.

http://www.thelocal.no/20120109/immigrants-behind-most-rapes-in-stavanger <- credible norway source in English that shows the same thing, its says Asian, but the majority of Asians in Norway are West-asian(Arabs).

I could not find a credible source on Sweden for you.

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