According to the Swedish Crime Survey 2022, an annual survey of some 200,000 people carried out for the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, 19.5 percent of Sweden’s adult population (16-84) reported being the victim of an “offence against the person” in 2021, a 0.7 percentage point fall on the share in 2020.
These offences include assault, threats, sexual offences, robbery, pickpocketing, sales fraud, card/credit fraud and online harassment.
According to the survey, the number of victims were relatively stable for “nearly all types of crime”, with only a slight increase in the fraudulent sale of goods.
In a tweet, Sweden’s outgoing justice minister Morgan Johansson noted that the fall in sexual offences “particularly stood out”, claiming that the report’s authors described the decline as “a reversal in the trend”.
För så gott som alla brottstyper minskar utsattheten, eller står stilla. Den enda brottstypen som har ökat är försäljningsbedrägerier.
Särskilt påtaglig är minskningen av utsattheten för sexualbrott, och där talar BRÅ om ett trendbrott sedan 2017.
— Morgan Johansson (@johanssonmorgan) October 13, 2022
Regarding self-reported exposure to sexual offence, 4.5 percent of the population (aged 16–84) state that they have been exposed to a sexual offence in 2021 and in 2020 the percentage was 4.6. This is a substantial decrease since 2019, where the percentage was 5.6. It has fallen every year since 2018, after increasing every year between 2011 and 2017.
The share of adult respondents who reported being victims of an assault was 2.8 percent, the same in 2020 and 2021. This rose between 2015-2019 but has since dropped and remained the same for the past three years.
The share who reported being assaulted so severely that they needed medical treatment was stable on last year at 0.5 percent, and down from an average of 0.7 percent between 2016 and 2019.
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Hej, thank you for sharing this information. Can you clarify if ‘self reported’ means that the person in question reported the information to the police, only to the surveyors or to both? I’ve read that since those who report sexual harassment can be ‘counter sued,’ so to say, by the person or people they identified, this has had a ‘chilling effect’ on people reporting these crimes. So, I’m wondering if the outgoing justice minister performed cause analysis for the trends and change in trends. For example, is the effect of COVID 19 social distancing policies taken into account? Is that reported ‘chilling effect’ taken into account? Based on articles I’ve read even here at The Local, when people of color and/or women report crimes to the police, they demonstrate a pattern of ignoring the victims, not investigating the allegations and just letting the reports ‘time out’ so they become inactive and are dropped. Is this a trend or prevalent practice that may have had an effect on the figures in the graphs above? I really want to believe that the trend in Sweden is toward lower crime rates, but I’m also left with questions about that.