The statistics on reported hate crimes are compiled annually in a report based primarily on police offence reports from Sweden. The method of data collection differs significantly from that employed in the official crime statistics.
Hate crimes are not a type of offence that is expressly regulated in regulations of their own in the Penal Code. Nor are there any special offence codes for hate crimes in the police’s computerized system for receiving a report.
From 2008, the receiver of the report must answer the question whether the crime in question is a suspected hate crime or not. This means that there is currently no opportunity to produce and publish statistics in the usual way regarding hate crimes reported to the police.
The motive for the crime is assessed on the basis of information included in the offence description contained in the police offence report, and the sample of offence reports employed in the compilation of the hate crime statistics is drawn above all from the offence report database using a number of pre-specified search terms. For the crime types agitation against ethnic group and unlawful discrimination, the mapping has however been comprehensive, that is all reports of these types of crimes have been scrutinized manually, irrespective of search word matches. In addition, hate crimes are characterised by a large dark figure, i.e. the amount of crime not reported to the police. This is why statistics do not reflect the actual extent of hate crime in Sweden.
What is a hate crime?
Although there is no uniform definition of the concept, hate crimes are characterised by the fact that they involve an offence against human rights and challenge the basic values of society which safe-guard the equal rights of all people. A hate crime may involve anything from offensive graffiti on someone’s house to murder – it is the underlying motive for the criminal act that determines whether or not an offence is defined as a hate crime. In the statistics, hate crimes are classified into four categories of offence: crimes with xenophobic/racist, anti-religious (Islamophobic, anti-Semitic and other anti-religious crimes), homophobic, biphobic or heterophobic and transphobic motives.
Xenophobic/racist hate crimes are the most frequent
In the course of 2009, hate crime motives were identified in just under 5,800 police offence reports. The motive for the hate crime was xenophobic/racist in the majority (almost 4,120) of the reported offences. One-fifth of the offence reports contained a homophobic, biphobic or heterophobic motive (1,066 offence reports) and one in ten offence reports contained a antireligious motive. 30 reports had a transphobic motive. Ten percent of all reported hate crimes were white power ideologically motivated in the sense that the perpetrator may have yelled “white power”, for example, or painted offensive graffiti in the form of swastikas.
In 2008, the definition of hate crime and the method for gathering information from the narratives of reports to the police was changed. As a result it is not possible to straight off compare the level of hate crimes with previous years.
Hate crimes often occur in everyday situations
The most common offence types found among hate crimes are unlawful threats and harassment (43 per cent), followed by violent offences (21 per cent) and defamation (13 per cent). The offences for the most part occur in the context of the victims’ everyday life e.g. in the home, at school or at the workplace. These incidents are much more common than those that occur in connection with places of public entertainment. In over half of the reported hate crimes the perpetrator is completey unknown to the victim.
How many hate crimes are cleared by the police and prosecutors?
In March 2010, 8 per cent of all reported hate crimes from the year 2008 had been cleared-up by person-based clearances. In the majority of the cases, where a person has been tied to the offence, a clearence means that the case resulted in a court prosecution. The person-based clearances was lowest for the islamophobic hate crimes (4 per cent).
The structure of hate crime is confirmed by the Swedish Crime Survey (SCS)
According to data from the annual Swedish Crime Survey, exposure to crimes with xenophobic motives is more common than exposure to crimes with homophobic motives. The other hate crime motives are not covered by the survey. The survey data however show that just under one third (31 per cent) of the xenophobic and homophobic hate crimes reported to the Swedish crime survey in 2008 had also been reported to the police.
Most hate crime suspects and victims are males
The majority of those who are suspected of hate crimes (80 per cent) and of those who are exposed to hate crimes (65 per cent) are men. In 2009 just over 1,870 individuals were suspected in connection with hate crimes. The average age was highest among those suspected of crimes with antireligious or xenophobic/racist motives(31 years) and lowest among those suspected of crimes with transphobic motive (26 years). Nearly 50 percent of all people suspected of crimes with a homophobic motive were younger than 20 years.
The level of prior involvement in crime varies among those suspected of different types of hate crime
More than half (59 per cent) of the individuals who were suspected of hate crimes in 2009 had no criminal record during the ten years prior to the current offence. Those suspected of xenophobic/racist hate crimes presented the highest levels of prior involvement in crime.
There are substantial regional variations, and hate crime is not a typically urban phenomenon
Although the county of Stockholm presents the highest number of reported hate crimes, hate crime cannot be said to occur primarily in the metropolitan counties. After Stockholm, when the mean population size is taken into account, the more rural Uppland and Västermanland are the counties where the most hate crimes have been reported (approximately 69 and 89 reported offences respectively per 100,000 of population).
