Agenda debate on degrading youth robbery: "Not about racism"

- To see how you urinate on victims when you take their valuables and film it, it feels in your stomach. It is children and young people who will be traumatized for a long time, says Mustafa Panshiri, who previously worked as a police officer and who now lectures at schools on integration.

He thinks there is a clear ethnic aspect to the recent robbery.

- They are actively looking for Swedes to give up. It is not about racism but they are looking for people who do not have a violent capital and who will not resist, he says.

Felipe Estrada, professor of criminology at Stockholm University, says the research does not provide any support for the ethnic factor.

- Most people with a foreign background do not commit serious violent crimes. Those who commit crimes have other risk factors in common and these are about psychiatric problems and serious growing up problems, he says.

Another aspect of the recent robbery is that the robbers humiliated and filmed their victims. Humiliation has always been an element of crime, but it has opened up in a different way with social media, says Jacob Fraiman, who works with young criminals at the Young Crisis in Södertälje.

- You have to film everything, it may be a signal to other criminals that we are dangerous and capable of this.

The youth robbery was also at a very high level in the late 1990s, according to a study that Agenda took part in. According to a special report on the situation in Malmö and Stockholm from 2000, they were in fact more than today.

- We had a big peak in the late 90's when the mobile phones came and were something very desirable. Then we saw a marked decline in reported crimes until about 2014 and 2015, says Felipe Estrada.

He can't answer why the robbery went up and down. Surveys conducted with young people show that there is a large dark figure. Many are ashamed to tell what they have been through. But in these surveys, the same increase is not the case as in the registration statistics.

- At best, this is a sign that more young people dare to report the crimes they are exposed to, he says.

View the entire debate in SVT Play