After winning the elections two years ago, Sweden’s center-right government took over a country plagued by gang violence so severe that in Europe, only Montenegro and Albania are ahead of it in the rankings of gun deaths per capita. The coalition government has been toughening sentencing rules—to which gangs have responded by turning to minors, who face the prospect of juvenile justice rather than life sentences in the adult system, for contract killings.
After winning the elections two years ago, Sweden’s center-right government took over a country plagued by gang violence so severe that in Europe, only Montenegro and Albania are ahead of it in the rankings of gun deaths per capita. The coalition government has been toughening sentencing rules—to which gangs have responded by turning to minors, who face the prospect of juvenile justice rather than life sentences in the adult system, for contract killings.
In the first half of this year, the number of under-15s suspected of being involved in murder plans was up nearly four times compared with last year. Youngsters in Sweden are even being recruited for contract killings in Denmark. The previous government energetically advocated a soft-glove approach for those involved in gangs. Now, not even an iron fist may suffice.
Swedes used to think of teenage killers as an American problem, but now they’re a domestic one. Between January and July, 93 children aged 14 and younger were suspected of being involved in murder, attempted murder, or aiding and abetting murder, according to Swedish prosecutors. That’s up from 26 during the same period the year before—and 26 is itself a significant number, especially in a country of just 10.5 million people. At the end of last month, two youths received long prison sentences for three murders committed in 2023, when they were 15 and 16, respectively. Four teenagers from small towns in the north are being investigated for two killings far from their hometowns this summer. They appear to have been recruited by gangsters needing murderers for hire.
Why this surge in juvenile killings? Sweden’s government has been trying to rein in the country’s rampant gun violence by stiffening prison sentences. Though the previous government—comprising Social Democrats, at times in coalition with the Greens—had spent years assuring the Swedish public that nothing much was amiss, Swedes could see with their own eyes, and through growing crime figures, how murders and attempted murders proliferated in their previously mostly peaceful nation. Last year, there were 363 shootings, which resulted in 53 deaths—not to mention other violent crime.
The current justice minister, Gunnar Strommer, and his fellow ministers have been trying to stem the violence by toughening sentences and, most recently, making it easier to give under-18s custodial sentences. The coalition has proposed custodial sentences for 15- to 17-year-olds who have committed murders and other serious crimes; today, by contrast, they’re sent to youth centers for rehabilitation treatment. The effectiveness of such treatment is questionable and has been further undermined by offenders’ habit of escaping, often with the aid of gangs. The government’s plans for more prison sentences make eminent sense.
But gangsters have little respect for human life, including the lives of children. Sweden’s gangs—which often partner with gangs in countries such as Albania, Kosovo, and Turkey, as well as Kurdish regions—have simply shifted their recruitment of contract killers to a younger demographic.
There’s a connection between organized crime and some of Sweden’s ethnic minority communities. According to police statistics, lethal violence is three and a half times as common among so-called vulnerable neighborhoods as in other ones. But even though the police do valiant work in such areas (one officer was shot and killed by 17-year-old while on patrol three years ago), the proliferation in violence has continued. The result is the appalling figure that prosecutors presented last month: a 258 percent increase, between last year and this year, in under-15s involved in murder, manslaughter, or plans for such crimes.
The young murderers are being recruited on the internet, Swedish authorities say: both on Western social messaging services and on the Russian messaging service Telegram, whose founder was recently arrested in France over accusations that his app had become a hotbed of criminal organizations. There are even special apps for contract killings on which anyone can accept a task upon seeing the details and the pay. Lisa Dos Santos, a Swedish prosecutor specializing in organized crime, told Swedish broadcaster SVT that the tech giants should ban such murder ads—a logical proposal, one might think. But the ads keep appearing, since tech giants don’t seem to enforce their existing rules.
Indeed, Sweden’s gang dystopia is spreading to Denmark. In recent weeks, 17 Swedish citizens have been arrested for violent crimes in the neighboring nation. Some were already part of feuding gangs that have Danish partners. The Foxtrot gang, for instance, is a partner of the Danish gang Loyal to Familia. Among their enemies is another Sweden-based gang led by Ismail Abdo, who is also thought to be hiding in Turkey. The Swedish gangs have expanded their activities (that is, drug selling) and feuds to Norway, too. This summer, Norwegian police reported that Foxtrot had even begun recruiting youths from government-run treatment homes. Additional Sweden-based youths are taking on contract killings elsewhere. Within one week this month, three Swedish teenagers were arrested in Denmark for three separate attempted murders.
Now, the Danish government has introduced identity checks at the border, which ordinarily don’t exist, as both countries belong to the Schengen Area. On Aug. 21, Strommer traveled to Copenhagen for consultations with his Danish counterpart. There’s no doubting his willingness to combat the scourge that’s hurting not just Sweden but its neighbors, too. Strommer, though, may have encountered ministerial dysfunction in its purest form: Little he and his fellow ministers can do will stop these ruthless gangs and the blight they’re spreading. Would it even be possible to introduce prison sentences for under-15s?
Meanwhile, the Social Democrats are in opposition, at a safe distance from the calamity they naively allowed to flourish during their eight years in power, some of it in coalition with the Greens. Many ministers from the previous center-right government, which was also in power for eight years and shares responsibility for the tragedy, similarly face no accountability, having decamped to the private sector or county governorships.
When the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition took power in the United Kingdom after the 2010 elections, Liam Byrne—a junior minister in the Treasury—left a note in the ministerial desk drawer for his successor: “I’m afraid there’s no money left.” If Strommer’s predecessors had a similarly dry sense of humor, they could have left a note in his drawer saying, “There are no solutions left.” But they didn’t just lack a sense of humor; they also lacked the insight to grasp how the culture of violence they had allowed to fester might undermine not just local communities but the whole country—and other countries, too. Gangs’ “use of violence threatens the security and freedom of the general public, they threaten civil servants working for our social agencies, they try to infiltrate the courts, the police, our prisons,” Strommer told the Financial Times this month. Like many criminologists, Strommer predicts that it will take at least a decade to ensure today’s preschoolers don’t turn to violent crime when reaching their teens.
At their meeting on Aug. 21, Strommer and Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard vowed to strengthen coordination with third countries to ensure more criminals wanted for violent crimes in Sweden and Denmark are extradited there. Turkey is likely to be top of the list. But the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which so fiercely resisted Sweden’s NATO accession on the grounds that Sweden had refused to extradite Kurdish militants, is unlikely to go out of its way to assist Sweden’s criminal justice system. One can only wish Strommer luck.
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