Even as Germany has grappled with a scandal over alleged sexual assaults involving migrants, Sweden has been embroiled in its own sexual assault controversy.
It erupted on Jan. 11 after the liberal newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported leaked police memos indicating that Swedish police had covered up reports of groping and the sexual harassment of young girls at a Swedish music festival last summer by refugee youths. The story implied that the police covered-up the reports in order to avoid anti-immigrant sentiment.
The attention on these particular assaults has put many Swedish feminists in an uncomfortable place. They don’t want to play down the very real threat of sexual violence that all men potentially pose, but they don’t want that threat used as a political weapons against refugees. “It is very dangerous to racialize sexual harassment,” says Tiina Rosenberg, a founding member of Sweden’s feminist party, the Feminist Initiative, and a gender scholar and professor at Stockholm University.
“There is a long post-colonial history of the white patriarchy trying to rescue the brown women from the brown men… There is a lot of [similar] racialized talk in the making today that is anti-migration, and we should be very careful about that. We should talk about all the harrassment against women. We should object and protest, but we should not make the distinction about people from another ethnic background that they are more violent than we are… because otherwise we find ourselves in a place of saying: ‘I’m not a racist, but…'”
Other Swedish feminists agreed, saying that, while it may be good that it the national refugee crisis brought attention to the violence all women face, it is wrong to describe the problem as specific to refugees. “This kind of harassment and violence has been going on for a long time in every country,” says Gudrun Schyman, a Swedish politician and spokeswoman for the Feminist Initiative, “What is common is men.”
Yet, Ebba Witt-Brattström, a Swedish feminist who now teaches at the University of Helsinki still saw a silver lining: “It is a good thing for women that at last the sexual harassment of young women that has been going on in schools and on the net, everywhere and at every time has surfaced where it can be debated by everybody.”
http://time.com/4182186/sweden-feminists-sexual-assault-refugees/
It erupted on Jan. 11 after the liberal newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported leaked police memos indicating that Swedish police had covered up reports of groping and the sexual harassment of young girls at a Swedish music festival last summer by refugee youths. The story implied that the police covered-up the reports in order to avoid anti-immigrant sentiment.
The attention on these particular assaults has put many Swedish feminists in an uncomfortable place. They don’t want to play down the very real threat of sexual violence that all men potentially pose, but they don’t want that threat used as a political weapons against refugees. “It is very dangerous to racialize sexual harassment,” says Tiina Rosenberg, a founding member of Sweden’s feminist party, the Feminist Initiative, and a gender scholar and professor at Stockholm University.
“There is a long post-colonial history of the white patriarchy trying to rescue the brown women from the brown men… There is a lot of [similar] racialized talk in the making today that is anti-migration, and we should be very careful about that. We should talk about all the harrassment against women. We should object and protest, but we should not make the distinction about people from another ethnic background that they are more violent than we are… because otherwise we find ourselves in a place of saying: ‘I’m not a racist, but…'”
Other Swedish feminists agreed, saying that, while it may be good that it the national refugee crisis brought attention to the violence all women face, it is wrong to describe the problem as specific to refugees. “This kind of harassment and violence has been going on for a long time in every country,” says Gudrun Schyman, a Swedish politician and spokeswoman for the Feminist Initiative, “What is common is men.”
Yet, Ebba Witt-Brattström, a Swedish feminist who now teaches at the University of Helsinki still saw a silver lining: “It is a good thing for women that at last the sexual harassment of young women that has been going on in schools and on the net, everywhere and at every time has surfaced where it can be debated by everybody.”
http://time.com/4182186/sweden-feminists-sexual-assault-refugees/
