The Norwegian Royal Palace, located in the heart of Oslo, is surrounded by a pleasant little park called Slottsparken. It contains lawns, flower beds, and a rippling brook spanned by a footbridge. Behind the Palace is a small cabin where members of the palace guard spend their down time napping and watching TV.
A less charming feature of the park is that it’s also been the setting of several rapes – no fewer than five of them between June and October of 2011 alone. Things got so bad that the Radisson Hotel – which is just across the street from the park, a minute’s walk from the Palace – began to provide its guests with rape alarms to wear when going out for a stroll.
A newspaper profile of one of the 2011 Slottsparken rapists provides a pretty representative picture of the kind of individual who commits most of these crimes. The perpetrator was a young Iraqi man who came to Norway in 2003 as an asylum seeker. His asylum application was rejected, but – as is standard practice – he was allowed to stay anyway. Three years later, he brutally raped an 18-year-old girl outside Oslo’s City Hall and was sentenced to four years in prison. In 2009, after his release, a deportation order was issued; he challenged it in court; in 2010, he lost his case. Nonetheless, he was again allowed to stay. A year later, still in Oslo, he raped a woman outside the Royal Palace.
A Muslim asylum seeker; a rap sheet; a meaningless deportation order: in today’s Scandinavia, these are among the standard bullet points on many a rapist’s résumé.
Yes, as I’ve noted before, Scandinavian policing could be better. Much better. Especially in Oslo, where the force is woefully undermanned and underfunded. Seeing officers at work, you can get the impression they’re still being trained out of a manual from half a century ago, when Oslo was as sleepy, well-behaved, and foreigner-free as Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. Last September, an Oslo rape victim complained publicly that the cops had waited six months to take witness testimony from her thirteen-year-old son. Such stories are common. And not just in Oslo: this languorous approach to law enforcement is a familiar phenomenon throughout the Nordic countries, where the only real crime, it can sometimes seem, is to display a sense of urgency about anything.....
Yes, as I’ve noted before, Scandinavian policing could be better. Much better. Especially in Oslo, where the force is woefully undermanned and underfunded. Seeing officers at work, you can get the impression they’re still being trained out of a manual from half a century ago, when Oslo was as sleepy, well-behaved, and foreigner-free as Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. Last September, an Oslo rape victim complained publicly that the cops had waited six months to take witness testimony from her thirteen-year-old son. Such stories are common. And not just in Oslo: this languorous approach to law enforcement is a familiar phenomenon throughout the Nordic countries, where the only real crime, it can sometimes seem, is to display a sense of urgency about anything.....
Les hele: Scandinavian Rape, Scandinavian Blinders
