In the summer of 2014 the ‘We Are Stockholm’ music festival took place as normal. Except that at the event dozens of girls as young as 14 were surrounded by gangs of immigrants, particularly from Afghanistan, molested and raped. Local police covered up the case, making no mention of it in their report on the five-day festival. There were no convictions and the press avoided any mention of the rapes. Similar organised rapes by migrant gangs occurred at music festivals in 2015 in Stockholm and Malmö among other cities. The figures were extraordinary. Whereas in 1975 there were 421 rapes reported to the Swedish police, by 2014 the annual number of rapes reported had risen to 6,620.5 By 2015 Sweden had the highest level of rapes per capita of any country in the world after Lesotho. When the Swedish press did report these events they wilfully misreported them. For instance, after the gang rape of a girl on a ferry from Stockholm to Abo, Finland, it was reported that the culprits were ‘Swedish men’ when they were in fact Somalis. It was the same story as in all of the neighbouring countries. Research published in Denmark in 2016 showed that Somali men were around twenty-six times more likely to commit rape than Danish men, adjusted for age.6 And yet in Sweden as everywhere else this subject remained unbroachable.

It took the 2015 New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne and the scandal of that cover-up to be unearthed for the Swedish media to even report on what had happened for years at Swedish music festivals and other events. Not only was a cover-up by the police finally exposed, but the cover-up by the Swedish press was revealed as well, thanks to the work of a number of web magazines and blogs. All of this was happening against a background of daily new arrivals, even in 2014, which meant that in August of that year the Prime Minister admitted that with asylum seekers coming into the country at such a rate, ‘We will not be able to afford much else.’ ‘But,’ said Reinfeldt, refusing to change his government’s policy, ‘it’s really people fleeing for their lives.’ That Christmas Eve the then ex-PM gave a television interview in which he said that the Swedish people themselves are ‘uninteresting’, that borders are ‘fictional’ constructs, and that Sweden belongs to the people who have come to make a better life there rather than to the people who have lived there for generations.