The Child Soldiers of Sweden

And the root causes of violence

I have met former child soldiers and girls who were gang raped by terrorists, on a trip to Uganda. I wrote about it years ago for The Catholic Herald; I mention this because the experience will be part of my next book but one. Child soldiers are a feature of some of Africa’s nastier conflicts, but the phenomenon, of corrupting children and turning them into killers, has gained a foothold in Sweden too.

There is a long article in The Sunday Telegraph, which makes instructive reading: the Swedish journalist Diamant Salihu says: “We have so many child soldiers that nobody can count anymore.”

What is happening in Sweden makes terrible reading, so please do read it. The facts and statistics are very sad. Not many want to talk about Sweden’s gang violence, though, as the gangs are all rooted in immigrant communities, and to condemn gang violence can be taken as a proxy for being hostile to immigration. Needless to say that this fear of being accused of racism is not well-founded, as the original gangs in Sweden are all from the ex-Yugoslavia and composed of white Europeans.

The usual culprit for organised crime is commonly thought to be poverty and the lack of opportunity. That is the common explanation for the Mafia, for example, and the Camorra. But Mr Salihu has this to say:

“In the Swedish areas that have social problems, I didn’t see the same bad standard of housing and class differences that I saw in the UK… So why, when we in Sweden have a generally better standard of living, do we have this escalation of violence?”

It is hard to pin the blame for the rise in gang violence in Sweden on poverty or social inequality, in one of the world’s richest and most egalitarian countries. So what is the root cause? That, I would hazard, is to be found in the family structures that are common in the migrant communities. Albania, and Somalia, to name but two, have societies based on clans, and clan feuding is common in both places, and in the diaspora. The same is true of Sicily and Calabria. In addition, when lots of mature men are sent to jail, or killed, that creates fatherless families, and these are fertile grounds for the recruitment of child soldiers. So, the real cause of the violence in Sweden does not lie with Sweden, but within the immigrant communities themselves. It is an imported problem. The same was true in the United States, where, in its 1930’s heyday, the Mafia was most definitely an imported problem, though it subsequently became rooted in the host community. I doubt many Mafiosi in the States feel any real attachment, other than sentimental one, to the Old Country today.

Salihu points out that ‘many gang members he interviews, meanwhile, don’t blame society or their parents, but “actively choose their lifestyle”.’ If it is not poverty, it is often choice, and the role of gangster might seem immensely attractive to a bored youngster of 14: the money, the thrills, the ‘respect’. It is here we encounter another sort of poverty, moral poverty. Boys become gangsters because they have nothing better to do, no higher calling, no ideals, no sense of purpose in life. In Africa, children, like the ones I met, were forced to become child soldiers. In Sicily and Sweden they are queuing up to do so, it seems. It is a symptom of our moral decay. No amount of government spending is going to cure that.