Report Finds Young Swedes Getting Robbed by Immigrants

In the 2,489 juvenile robberies reported between 2015 and 2019, two thirds of the culprits had a foreign background, while 77 percent of the victims had a Swedish background, a fresh report has found.

Juvenile robberies have soared in Sweden, and it is most often immigrants who target Swedes, appears from a new report published by the country's Crime Prevention Council (Brå).

Between 2015 and 2019, the number of reported robberies against minors doubled, from 1,084 to 2,489, the report said.

“In 2020, the number of reported youth robberies decreased somewhat, probably as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the reduction only took place in large cities and suburban municipalities. In the rest of the country, the number of reported robberies has continued to increase”, Brå investigator Sara Jonsson said.

Of the suspected robbers, two thirds had a foreign background, while 77 percent of the victims had a Swedish background, the report said.

A typical suspect of juvenile robbery is thus a boy aged 15–17 with a foreign background, living in one of the country's numerous “vulnerable areas”, which critics averse to official parlance tend to call ghettos. According to Brå, the motives for the youth robberies usually include a need for money, the desire to gain status within their own group, and an underlying conflict between the suspect and the victim. Nearly half of all juvenile robberies are committed by habitual offenders.

Furthermore, an increasing share of young people say that they are worried about exposure to robbery, a trend especially clear among boys.

“Even though robbery constitutes a fairly small proportion of all juvenile delinquency, it is a very serious crime. Being exposed to robbery is a traumatic experience that can take a long time to process,” Brå investigator Maria von Bredow said.

Although suspected boys make up a majority, the proportion of girls suspected of juvenile robbery has also increased, from 4 percent to 8 percent during the period 2015–2019. The increase in the Stockholm police region is particularly clear, according to the report.

According to Brå investigator Anna Öström, the robberies also feature threats, violence, use of force and humiliation.

At 25.9 percent, Sweden has the highest percentage of people with an immigrant background in all of Scandinavia, with their share being even higher in younger cohorts due to demographic trends.

In recent years, Sweden has been engulfed in a deadly spiral of gang-related violence and organised crime, with shootings often dominating the news cycle. Furthermore, the country's police estimated that at least 5,000 gang members are active in over 60 so-called “vulnerable areas” across Sweden (alternatively referred to as “no-go zones”) and named some 40 criminal clans, some of which arrived in Sweden from abroad solely for the purpose of committing crimes.