Over last weekend, more than 50 cases of sexual assault were reported across two Swedish festivals. At one – Bravalla – five women said they had been raped and another 12 reported sexual assault, while at the other – Putte i Parken – there were a further 35 reports of assault, the youngest from a girl aged 12. In a statement on the Värmland regional police’s website, the Putte i Parken assaults were attributed to “foreign young men”. “There is no doubt,” the statement said plainly, “about who takes these liberties”.
Except it turned out that there was doubt. Within a few hours the statement had been taken down.
The police later admitted that only two of the seven men or boys arrested for the Putte i Parken incidents were from HVB homes – residential homes for young people, often refugees without parents. There’s even less evidence to suggest the rapes at Bravalla were carried out by immigrants – but the two were instantly lumped together. “The wording was unfortunate,” read a second statement, “and we will take that to heart.”
the MailOnline’s news story cited authorities as identifying the perpetrators of the assaults as “young men, who are foreigners.”; the Telegraph’s headline warned of “reports of rapes by ‘migrants’”. And so an inaccurate, retracted police statement, and one victim’s speculation that they were “probably immigrants” turned into fact.
However much the media (and sometimes the police, it would seem) like to suggest otherwise, the threat of rape and sexual assault at festivals does not simply come from some easily pigeonholed “other”. It’s wrong to lay the blame, as we do for so many of the world’s problems, on a faceless foreign mass. To do so is to derail an issue that badly needs addressing. Because it’s not as though these were isolated incidents, confined only to Swedish festivals where foreigners are present. Far from it.
In 2009, a woman was raped at Reading festival. In 2010, a 16-year-old boy was found guilty of attacking a 12-year-old girl at Secret Garden Party and
two women were raped – in unrelated incidents – at Latitude. In 2013, two women were assaulted at
Wilderness festival. Last year, a man
was arrestedon suspicion of raping a woman at V festival.
In the early Swedish news reports, Patricia Lorenzoni, a researcher and lecturer at Linköping University, was one of the few dissenting voices. Does she feel migrants were disproportionately blamed for crimes such as these? “Yes,” she says, “and there is plenty of statistical data showing this.
Racist and rightwing populist groups have for years tried to create a climate of fear around the image of the ‘immigrant’ rapist. What is worrying now is that this language is becoming part of more general media reporting.”
If we allow this trend to continue, then we fail to examine our own culpability when it comes to rape culture.
A Swedish police report on sexual assault in the country, for example, referred to the damage caused by ideas of “masculinity”, as well as the normalisation of sexual harassment in schools. But these nuanced analysis and deep-rooted causes don’t make for quite such exciting headlines.
To paint the perpetrators of sexual assault as some monolithic, easily identifiable group also makes it easier to continue the victim-blaming. Because it should be easy to avoid being assaulted at a festival, right? Just avoid the men who have “attacker” practically written on their foreheads. In 2010, after the attack at Reading, festival organiser Melvin Benn spoke of a plan to “inform young girls in particular about the danger of sexual predators”. There was no mention of how the festival planned to deal with the sexual predators themselves. The same year, Hop Farm festival founder Vince Power said a festival was essentially a small town, “and in a town you wouldn’t leave your door open”. In doing so, he painted the women who’d been assaulted as victims of nothing but their own carelessness.
As long as we continue to put the onus of responsibility on the victims in this way, and paint the perpetrators as a foreign threat miring what could otherwise be some festival utopia, that door will remain open.
In a more measured statement following the weekend’s attacks, Swedish police admitted that “the descriptions [of perpetrators] are diverse”. There is, they said, just one common denominator: “These are all young men.” However much we try and twist the narrative, there is no homogenous, easily recognisable perpetrator of violence – least of all at festivals. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we might be able to stop it from happening.
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