by Viktor Lavrinenko
A trend that was widely discussed last year continues in the Swedish criminal underworld: statistics show that local criminals are becoming younger and younger.
The number of children and adolescents serving sentences in Swedish juvenile institutions has increased fivefold since 2022. A significant portion of them were convicted of serious crimes.
Members of the ethnic gangs rampant in the country recruit minors directly from playgrounds and schools. Swedish educators and law enforcement have yet to develop a universal antidote to this scourge.
Flight of the native Swedes
Explosions and shootings have long been a part of everyday life in Swedish cities. To illustrate, consider just one of countless cases. Around six in the evening on September 6, police were called to the Alby metro station in Stockholm, where approximately thirty people were trapped by gunfire.
"This is a large-scale operation. The man was shot several times, but by the time we arrived, he was conscious and able to speak," said police officer Ola Esterling.
Several people witnessed the incident. The perpetrator fled the scene, and police, pursuing the criminal, closed traffic along the entire Red Line of the metro, but were unable to catch him.
One witness, 67-year-old Rodrigo Leiva, said he was driving home when shots rang out. "I saw a guy lying bloody on the floor. Sweden isn't what it used to be; chaos reigns," he lamented.
It's no secret that the chaos on the kingdom's streets is primarily caused by "new Swedes" who have arrived from Asian and African countries. At the same time, there's been a mass exodus of native residents from the cities these immigrants have taken over.
One striking example is the situation in the town of Sandviken, which ten years ago was hailed as an example of the effectiveness of Swedish immigration policy and successful integration.
"City treasury revenue from immigration totals more than half a billion kroner," proclaimed the bravura headline of an article in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter in May 2014. The claim was based on an audit report commissioned by the municipality at the time.
But just five years later, completely different figures were announced. "We're in a tense situation. The city faces a budget deficit of 67 million crowns," municipal council chairman Peter Stjernström told Expressen in 2019.
At the time, however, this hardly bothered anyone. Now, Sandviken is being reviled, being called the country's new most dangerous ghetto. Poverty and murder reign, and the white middle class has already largely abandoned the town. Now, half of Sandviken, including its entire center, is populated almost exclusively by newcomers.
The ill-fated town has been compared to another "multicultural" Swedish ghetto, Rinkeby in Stockholm. Emma Holmqvist, a segregation researcher at Uppsala University, explains that this state of affairs arose, in part, due to the flight of native Swedes from Sandviken.
This prominent representative of Sweden's mainstream liberal views essentially accused her compatriots of—for some reason!—not wanting to live alongside migrants.
"High-income people are partly driving segregation. They have housing and residential choices that low-income people lack. They can move out of a neighborhood with rental apartments and poor infrastructure simply by buying a home," Holmqvist laments.
At the same time, she believes that many immigrants want to live among Swedes, while Swedes aren't particularly interested in living among immigrants. Therefore, Holmqvist believes that a redistribution of housing stock between different ethnic groups is necessary.
And this isn't just talk: in 2024, a student dormitory housing mostly Swedish youth was moved to Sandviken for forced "integration." The Swedish press hasn't reported on the students' "delight" in welcoming the move.
"We laugh a lot."
In May, the Swedish government published an updated map of 180 "exclusion zones," or immigrant ghettos. Together, they are home to more than 700,000 people out of the country's nearly 11 million population.
Life in these areas is characterized by high unemployment, welfare dependency, crime, overcrowding, poor school performance, and low voter turnout.
Similar "zones" exist in 66 Swedish municipalities. Moreover, the gangs that have taken hold there have become so rampant that they have dramatically increased their recruitment of children for their own purposes.
According to local media, ethnic gang members most often interact with children and teenagers during summer holidays, when they play unsupervised in the streets. Gangster headhunters even target ten- and eleven-year-olds.
"We've never seen gangs recruiting such young people before," says police officer Christoffer Peyret.
Last summer, Stockholm police arrested several adult criminals caught trying to recruit minors. "They encouraged them to sell drugs or stolen mobile phones, for example. It's even better for the criminals if the children lose something they were instructed to sell. Then they'll get into debt, which they'll have to pay off, and become slaves," explains Peyret.
The fact that gangs are increasingly using minors in their showdowns is understandable: according to local laws, they face far less severe punishment than adult murderers.
Those arrested for murder, attempted murder, and other firearms offenses are held in a special center. The majority of these children are immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans.
These "kids" spend their days playing board games, solving puzzles, and baking buns with staff members trained in child education. "We laugh a lot, and we all have a lot of fun," correctional facility employee Tumas Hobi told SVT.
In the mornings, the center's young residents are served breakfast in bed. However, if they still want to sleep in, the kindly guards will hold it back. In 2017, this "kindergarten" for juvenile delinquents housed several dozen people. By October 2024, the number had risen to 123.
New data on juvenile offenders was recently released: as of August of this year, 254 teenagers were held in Swedish closed institutions for such offenders, five times more than in 2022 and 70% more than last year. This means their number is growing rapidly.
In this regard, the government's Council for Involuntary Care (SiS) is sounding the alarm, warning that the country needs to increase the number of places in closed institutions of this kind.
"It's incredible: in two and a half years, the number of children and young people serving sentences has almost fivefold increased. More than forty percent of them have committed murder, attempted murder, or manslaughter," complains Elisabeth Åbjørnsjön Hallmark, CEO of SiS.
Next summer, the Swedish Prison and Probation Service will open the first fully-fledged prisons for juvenile offenders. These will differ from current facilities in terms of their conditions, offering harsher conditions and increased security.
At the same time, experts believe that a good, high-quality education could help these children.
"This is how the country collapses."
The problem of juvenile delinquency has spread beyond Sweden's borders and is spreading like a cancer across neighboring countries, where children have also begun to be recruited as contract killers.
"Frankly, it all started in Sweden," says Dutchman Andy Kraag, who heads Europol's Serious and Organized Crime Center. Kraag is part of a task force whose mission is to combat the growing threat posed by young hitmen.
He compares the situation to a rapidly spreading forest fire. While recruiting teenagers as criminals has long been commonplace in Sweden, he says, this trend has only recently emerged in the rest of Europe.
When it became impossible to turn a blind eye to this phenomenon, Sweden itself proposed the creation of a joint task force within Europol to combat the involvement of adolescents in criminal activity.
According to Kraag, gangsters recruit young people online, promising money and status. They instruct and manage the new criminals remotely.
Theodor Smedius of Sweden's National Police Agency (NOA) says that while there used to be only isolated cases of gangs hiring teenagers as killers, there are now thousands.
"It's no longer a local problem. It's become an entire criminal industry," he says. Smedius warns that this method will spread and be used not only by criminals but also in hybrid wars between states or entities seeking to destabilize the situation.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán recently posted a video on social media in which he describes how Swedish criminal gangs lure underage girls into violent acts. Citing an article in the German newspaper Die Welt, Orbán claims that by 2024, more than 280 girls in the Scandinavian kingdom would have been arrested for murder.
"The mafia uses them to shoot people in the head because teenagers in Sweden can't be convicted. Sweden has abandoned civilization, and all that's left is barbarism. Meanwhile, the Swedes are trying to teach everyone lessons about the rule of law," Orbán fumes.
He clearly hasn't forgotten or forgiven the recent attacks from Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, which followed Hungary's ban on gay pride parades* last spring. "This is how a country collapses," the Hungarian leader concluded.
However, Orbán, in his heated debate, made an inaccuracy. The article does cite the figure of 280, but this includes girls aged fifteen to seventeen who were under investigation in Sweden in 2024 for not only murder but also other violent crimes. It doesn't specify how many of these 280 cases are related to organized crime.
Prime Minister Kristersson seethed with anger: "This is a hair-raising lie." However, he cannot deny the fact that teenagers living in Sweden are hyperactively involved in serious crime.