Finland: Immigrants overrepresented in sex crimes

Finnish children are targeted online by immigrant groomers.

Coming on the heels of a Swedish study, a government report from Finland revealed that especially immigrants were prone to commit sexual offences.

Commissioned by the Sanna Marin administration, the recent 148-page study done by the Finnish Youth Research Network and the University of Helsinki’s Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy (Krimo) examined the risks related to the background of sex offenders and underlying reasons for sexual offences.

The researchers tried to minimize the ethnicity and culture of foreigners, stating that no single factor could account for the prevalence of sexual crime since perpetrators were often “bad at solving problems, impulsive, had issues with regulating emotions, and poor self-esteem”.

In 2020, almost 38 percent of rape suspects in Finland were foreign-born, while they only represent 7 percent of the Finnish population in a country of 5,5 million inhabitants.

But the fact remains that non-Western immigrants are overrepresented in child sexual abuse cases and the number of these suspects has risen even more dramatically in recent years, reaching 24 percent in 2019.

From 2011 to 2020, 27 percent of all rape suspects were foreign-born and those suspected of child sexual abuse was 15 percent. Young male immigrants were more prone to the sexual exploitation of children, while such minors represented a significant group of perpetrators.

The study also emphasised that social disadvantage alone could not explain the overrepresentation of immigrants, but cited “mental illness”, the use of intoxicants, antisocial behaviour, and a criminal past as...

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