BY
These are mostly girls and women who are being taken back home for female genital mutilation and/or forced marriage.
“900 children have been taken out of Sweden – in five years,” translated from “900 barn har förts ut ur Sverige – på fem år,” by Cecilia Anderberg, SVT, February 13, 2023:
48 percent of the children who were abducted in an honor context during 2021 and 2022 were taken to Iraq and Somalia, SVT’s mapping shows.
Over 900 children have been taken out of Sweden since 2018, according to SVT Nyheter.
The majority of cases take place in an honor context or in connection with a custody dispute, according to the channel.
SVT has done the mapping using statistics from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the past five years, at least 1,151 people have been abducted or illegally detained in another country, according to the channel. 235 of them are over 18 – many of them young adults.
916 are children.
But the number of secret abductions is likely to be large, according to lawyer Ia Sveger, who has represented affected parents and children for two decades.
“The number is most likely even higher,” she tells SVT.
She explains that relatives do not report this because they do not trust that the Swedish authorities will be able to assist in the matter.
“This applies above all in abductions that take place to countries that are not affiliated to the Hague Convention – so-called non-convention countries. There, the help you can get from the Foreign Ministry is very limited,” says Ia Sveger to SVT.
Less than a third of the people in the cases return to Sweden, the mapping shows.
Close to half of the children who were abducted in an honor context in 2021 and 2022 are in Iraq or Somalia, according to SVT.
Wth is an “ honor” context?