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SABUNI

Sweden will not amend ‘wife import’ rules

Equality Minister Maria Arnholm wants Sweden to keep the right to deport women whose relationships with Swedish spouses end within two years of their arrival in Sweden.

Published: 9 March 2013 15:35 CET
Sweden will not amend 'wife import' rules

The two-year rule was introduced in an effort to clamp down on sham marriages and to put an end to so-called “wife imports”.

But it has been blamed for forcing women to remain in abusive relationships, with a 2012 government-ordered inquiry recommending the rule be abolished.

According to Eva Eriksson, who carried out that inquiry on behalf of the former equality minister, Nyamko Sabuni, thousands of newly arrived women seek help every year after being assaulted by their Swedish spouses.

Eriksson, who is the governor of Värmland in west Sweden, claimed that the two-year rule locks women and their children into abusive relationships.

But Arnholm, who replaced Sabuni as equality minister in January 2013, has defended the rule.

“I think it serves its purpose,” Arnholm told newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

“It makes it simple and possible for people who fall in love to quickly be able to be together and to live in the same country. I know that many people appreciate [the rule]. Removing it would have sad consequences.”

Arnholm did concede that there are some problems with the two-year rule.

“It should not be a protective shell or a pretext for battered women to stay with their men. We have to, at all costs, avoid the feeling that one gets thrown out of Sweden if one leaves an abusive man. But that does not lead me to conclude that the two-year rule should be abolished.”

As part of the 2012 inquiry, Eriksson spoke to social services, police, hospitals and women’s refuges.

She concluded that the extent of abuse suffered by women who came to Sweden to marry a Swedish man was widespread.

The report was welcomed by The National Organization for Women’s Shelters and Young Women’s Shelters in Sweden (Roks).

The Centre Party’s Women’s Association has also demanded that the two-year rule be scrapped, with its president, Gunilla Hjelm, urging Arnholm to take “immediate action” against “the practice of wife importation”.

She said it “puts thousands of women in vulnerable positions”.

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ECONOMY

‘Don’t fear the word power’: equality minister

Gender equality has fallen off many Swedish citizens' list of top-priorities, several speakers noted at a labour and equality conference in Stockholm on Thursday.

Published: 17 January 2013 16:03 CET
'Don't fear the word power': equality minister

“Saying that you want power kinda sounds like you want to get into a fight, which is why internationally people have talked about ‘influence’ instead,” Equality Minister Nyamko Sabuni said at the conference, which was organized by Sweden’s labour ministry.

“But power is good, it’s fantastic, it gives you influence.”

Sabuni spoke at the conference alongside two previous equality ministers – retired Liberal Party MP Bengt Westerberg and former Social Democrat Equality Minister Margareta Winberg.

When he served in the 1990s, Westerberg was hailed both as a superhero and scoundrel from opposite sides of the debate when he introduced a reform mandating that one month of parental leave had to be taken by the father.

Today, he is in favour of splitting parental leave evenly between the parents.

“It is one of the few tools left for politicians to influence the structure at home, which is were gender equality begins,” Westerberg said.

Strictly divvying up parental leave is not on the cards for the current government, however.

His successor, Margareta Winberg, said that, among Swedish voters, the question of gender equality was not ranked as important.

“Gender equality is not among the top five issues that Swedes think are important as election issues,” she said.

“So there’s a need to build up the topic, to shape public opinion.”

She joked that when she went on to become agriculture minister, which overlapped for two years with her ministerial post overseeing equality, the then Left Party leader Gudryn Schyman, who went on to create the Feminist Initiative party, used to call her “the minister for women and heffers”.

Winberg, when she headed the Social Democrat women’s association (S-kvinnor) in the early 1990s, is famous for pushing her party to strictly alternate between male and female candidates on the party list before elections (Sweden has proportional representation election system).

The alternate policy, dubbed “varannan damernas” (‘every other for the ladies’), was later adopted by most political parties in Sweden and is widely credited for making Sweden’s parliament the most gender equal in the world at the time.

Wrapping up the debate on Thursday, Winberg turned to Sabuni, who’d earlier in the discussion admitted her ministry does not do a good job at publicizing the work they do, and challenged her to improve her efforts.

“Please get better at communicating,” said Winberg.

Ann Törnkvist

Follow Ann on Twitter here

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