Sweden's Child Gangsters

And how Sweden became Sicily

The current edition of The Spectator has a very interesting article on organised crime in Sweden, which you can read here. There are two very interesting things to note.

Gang violence and membership have grown hugely in recent years, and the gangs are ethnically based. The members are not immigrants per se, but the children and grandchildren of immigrants. They are Swedish citizens, though they may not identity much with Swedish culture. The first stirrings of gang warfare in Sweden started (the article does not say, but so I understand) with the arrival of refugees from the Yugoslav civil war, and the original gangs were Serb, Croat or Bosnian; they had fought each other at home, and they continued when they got to Sweden.

I am going to the Balkans in May and perhaps will find out more then, but, from my current understanding, in the Balkans society is clan based. This means that you have the essential social structure on which a gang superstructure can easily be built. Somalia too is a clan-based society, and so is the Aspromonte district of Calabria, home to the most successful gang in the world, the ‘Ndrangheta. Sicily too, is somewhat clannish. We all know, surely, that gangs flourish in the sort of society where everyone knows everyone else, and everyone is related to everyone else in some way or another. In modern Sweden, as in Britain, cousinhood is a pretty meaningless relationship and most of us do not know the relations of our in-laws; but in the ethnic groups from which the Swedish gangs come from, the is not the case. Ironically, the success in maintaining family ties creates a malign side-effect, a gang culture.

Another sign of family values gone wrong is the recourse to vendetta and clan feuding. Tit for tat killings are still common in Albania, I know for a fact, and the same is going on in Sweden, where rival groups pick off members in revenge for slights that may be long forgotten.

The other thing the article focuses on is the extreme youth of the gangsters. As I have written before, this is something of a feature of the modern mafias. The law, both in Italy and Sweden, is not equipped to deal with very young criminals, and the age of criminal responsibility may not have caught up with the concept of fourteen-year-old killers. It is clear the law needs to change. Italy has, though it has taken a long time, managed to introduce a raft of anti-Mafia legislation. Sweden needs to do the same and soon.

But why does a ten-year-old want to join a gang, and why would a fourteen-year-old want to shoot someone? What a stupid question. Children love to push boundaries, they delight (sometimes) in cruelty, and they (some of them) love attention and feeling important. Killing someone gains you respect - the wrong sort of respect, objectively speaking, but in the world of the gang, the sort of respect that you crave, and the world of the gang may be the only world you know.

To turn the question around, why do gang leaders want to recruit children? There is the legal aspect, of course, and there is the fact that children will sometimes do the sort of things that adults, more aware of risk, would shy away from. There is also the suspicion that some adults may enjoy the exploitation of the young, vulnerable, innocent and eager to please. Why did Satan tempt Eve? Because he wanted to see her fail, that is why. And he wanted company in Hell, as well. The Mafia bosses are like Satan. They know they are damned, they know that they are in Hell, and the only comfort they have is the knowledge that they are not alone. Mafia bosses are child abusers, though not in the usual sense.

Sweden is a very different country to Italy, which is my main focus in writing The Chemist of Catania and its successors (incidentally, please follow the link, buy the book, or if you have done so already, leave a review or at least a five-star endorsement). One cannot blame Swedish organised crime on poverty, state inefficiency or poor social services or bad housing, all of which are a fact of life in Catania and Palermo. But one thing that both situations share is a lack of love for the state and a lack of patriotism. Traditional Sicilians loathe Garibaldi and Cavour and the Piedmontese, and blame the British for letting down the Neapolitan kingdom. Yes, all this happened in 1860, but it is not forgotten; though they have conveniently airbrushed from memory the way they also hated the Bourbons. That is the way human memory works: it is persistent and selective, and it has an irrational hold on us. I should imagine that many Swedes who are descended from immigrants (30% of the population) feel affinity for their own and little for Sweden itself. As for the ruin of Sweden’s reputation, they can shrug that off - after all, what does Sweden mean to them?