In a review by Uppdrag Granskning, a number of former students from various religious free schools in the country testify about spiritual and psychological abuse.
Shams is one of those who share his schooling, and talks about his time at the Muslim independent school Ögårdsskolan in Malmö.
Shams says that in Islamology classes, the students were taught that God could summon demons at any time if He was displeased with one, and that one should beware of them.
- We learned to be afraid of God, because God is the greatest and has all power, so I was very afraid as a child, says Shams.
Shameful to laugh out loud
She talks about how the school treated boys and girls differently, and that as a girl she was taught to be alert to the man's gaze and not attract the man's desires.
- On one occasion when I was sitting in the dining hall with my girl friends, a teacher thought I laughed too loudly, and came up to me and said it was "aeyb", which means shame in Arabic.
It was shameful to laugh so loudly.
"Today we had acted immediately"
Carl Johan Kamf, principal at the school since 2019, says that the content of Islamology has changed since then and that the approach that Shams testifies to is not still in today's teaching.
- If similar values had emerged at the school today, we would have acted immediately, says Carl Johan Kamf.
Do you differentiate between girls and boys?
- Not at all, they sit together in the classrooms, they play together at breaks, to some extent anyway just like other boys and girls, they do sports together and swim together.
See the full review on SVT Play.