The proportion of young criminal gang members has started to rise sharply in Sweden, and their crimes are even more brutal. Underage children are increasingly committing serious acts of gang violence.
A year ago, there were 1,200 minor members in criminal gangs, he estimates Swedish police. According to experts, the number of child members has increased and is still increasing.
The victims of gang violence in Sweden are also increasingly minors. At least four children were involved in the September shootings alone: two as victims, two as perpetrators.
Central Sweden police chief of intelligence Jale Poljarevius according to the gangs are now using children as killers who are afraid and do not have the slightest knowledge in the matter.
– Professional killers prepare for the act carefully, identify their targets and make them clear. Now they use people who don’t know how to handle weapons at all. They are afraid and they may even be pressured into actions by threats, Poljarevius tells SVT.
– They are very young and they use drugs to dare to do these things. This means that bystanders are also increasingly at risk.
Poljarevius finds the development shocking.
– It is unbelievable that a country with such fine traditions as a democratic and open society, and which has not been at war for a long time, has to experience something like this.
– However, this is a harsh reality and we have to fight against it with all means, Poljarevius continues in an interview with SVT.
According to Poljarevius, gangs hire teenage killers because the Swedish justice system treats young people leniently, and criminal organizations know it.
Also a Swedish newspaper Expressen describes the situation in its editorial: When the police finally catch a teenage suspect, they often have to release him after only a few hours. Instead of arresting the police, they call social services and request that the child be placed in compulsory care. Often the answer from the social service is that there are no vacancies.
When a verdict is finally given in the case, according to Poljarevius, the punishments are minor.
– You can murder someone and spend two or three years in prison, four at the most. That’s all. Of the given sentences, first-time offenders never serve their entire sentence in prison, says Poljarevius.
In the video below, Poljarevius describes the development in Sweden.
According to Poljarevius, a saying formed among young gang members summarizes well what the whole phenomenon is about.
– Young gang members have created a concept known as “brösta fyra för att bli en hundra”.
Loosely translated, it reads: take four to make you a hundred.
– This means that you kill someone, you receive a four-year sentence, which in Sweden is never really four years, and when you are released, you are one hundred percent a member of the gang.
New types of young people are joining gangs
But what makes young people join gangs and even kill in the first place?
Young people who join gangs are usually from areas with a lot of crime and severe social exclusion, he says Luay Mohageb.
Mohageb investigates youth crime in the Stockholm police.
– They are boys whose future prospects have not been very bright. They may have struggled at school. They may have already committed various crimes, and they don’t feel a sense of belonging to society, Mohageb tells .
According to Mohageb, it is common for young people placed in juvenile homes for previous crimes to escape from there to perform tasks for gangs in exchange for cash.
– Tasks can vary from shooting gates to blowing up apartments and shooting people.
According to Mohageb, young people who join gangs have traditionally been first- or second-generation immigrants from difficult home situations. Now, according to him, there has been a change in the matter.
– I and many of my colleagues feel that even boys and girls from slightly more stable backgrounds, who do not fit this traditional mold, have started to join gangs.
According to Mohageb, the police have previously been able to predict in which areas and under which conditions gang crime occurs. But now also ordinary Swedish boys and girls from middle-class families or young people from middle-class immigrant families who were born in Sweden have actively started to join criminal gangs.
– The boys want to be associated with gang circles. So they start performing various smaller tasks in gangs. The girls, on the other hand, have started keeping drugs and weapons in their rooms or hosting wanted criminals with them.
According to Mohageb, in the preliminary examinations he completes, it is repeatedly found that young people actively want to be part of the criminal lifestyle and gang culture.
According to him, it is a completely new phenomenon.
– This is something that should be discussed seriously in society, he states.
Gangsta rap exposes you to criminal culture
Mohageb doesn’t have an exact explanation for what has made ordinary young people idolize criminal life and criminal gangs, but he has a strong guess.
– The young people who are now active in gangs are between 15 and 19 years old. Since the age of ten, they have consumed daily content online and on social media, where gangster culture, materialism, money-orientedness and a certain kind of gangster mentality are idealized and romanticized.
According to Mohageb, a huge wave of gangsta rap music hit Sweden five years ago, glorifying violence, chauvinism, street gangs and crime.
According to him, gangsta rap has taken over Sweden’s youth culture completely in recent years.
– My theory is that these ideas have reached young people through gangsta rap music and the music videos shot by the artists performing it. Now the boys who have embraced the subculture see that they can achieve a high position in their community by committing crimes. They sell drugs, buy branded clothes and behave aggressively, violently, decisively and carelessly.
– The boys have noticed that these things improve their social status and that it impresses their friends and girls who belong to the same subculture and have adopted the same values.
In Mohageb’s view, young girls contribute to boys’ disorderly behavior by admiring rappers with a problematic mentality.
Gangsta rap artists advocate violence and the subjugation and oversexualization of women, but their biggest fans are often young girls. According to Mohageb, the boys have taken notice and feel that the gangster lifestyle is the one to aspire to.
According to Mohageb, the changed attitudes of young people are a feed for the criminal organizations operating in Sweden.
– All of a sudden, parent criminals who are willing to hire children to carry out criminal acts have an absolutely huge pool of boys and girls they can take advantage of.
Mohageb hopes that parents would monitor more closely what kind of content and what kind of lifestyle-idealizing content their children, who are always on their phones, consume.
Mohageb believes that gang crime in Sweden will only get worse. He urges to consider Sweden as a warning example.
– Do everything you can to learn from Sweden’s mistakes and make sure that gang violence does not become commonplace in Finland as well, he says.
On the map below, you can see what kind of attacks related to gang crime have been carried out in Sweden in the last three weeks. Touch or click on the number and you will get more information about the individual attack and possible victims.