The 32-year-old Tiina would prefer to move as soon as possible. Away from the Swedish deprived area of Årby, in Eskilstuna, more than 100 kilometers west of Stockholm. “It’s not safe in this neighborhood anymore.” She takes her four-year-old son to a playground on the edge of the neighborhood. She’s been avoiding the larger playground closer since a shooting nearby two weeks ago. Tiina doesn’t want to give her last name for fear of neighborhood criminals.
Security, immigration and integration are high on the agenda in Sunday’s Swedish parliamentary elections. In the first eight months of 2022, 47 people have already died – versus 45 in all of 2021.
“We really need to get rid of the drugs and the shootings – that’s why I choose the Sweden Democrats,” says Tiina. She grew up in Eskilstuna, an industrial town. The residents of the apartment buildings in the park-like area were startled at the end of August by a shooting in which a mother and her son were hit by bullets. According to the police, they were probably not the target, but victims of a spiral of violence between a drug gang from Årby and another, from the more northern district of Skiftinge.
According to the radical right-wing, anti-immigration party Sweden Democrats, which Tiina wants to vote for, the shooting is proof that integration in highly segregated suburbs such as this has failed. The Sweden Democrats want to deport convicted criminals with a migration background – a proposal that faces legal blocks because many are minors and have Swedish nationality. A significant proportion of voters see something in the plan; the party is in the polls on a small win, to above 20 percent of the vote.
Also read this interview about the success of the Sweden Democrats: ‘The radical right-wing view on migration is the new normal’
Vulnerable area
Årby is what Sweden is a ‘utsatt område’ calls it a sensitive area. The categorization is controversial because it is based on subjective and potentially discriminatory factors such as nationality, knowledge of Swedish and income level. Most gang problems take place in these vulnerable neighbourhoods.
Every Swedish city has a neighborhood like Årby: built in the sixties and seventies during the so-called Millionaire program, when social democratic governments took it upon themselves to accommodate the rapidly growing population. They built seven or eleven-storey blocks of flats, usually in a sprawling neighborhood around a shopping center and primary school. The homes – all rental – were virtually identical and aimed at lower incomes.
This income segregation still continues, but the poorer people are now mainly migrants who arrived after the Millions Programme: from migrants from the former Yugoslavia to refugees from countries such as Syria who came to Sweden in 2015 and 2016. In Årby, 53 percent of the population has a ‘low financial standard’, compared to 15 percent in the whole country.
The same pitfalls
“Look, this is how they try to seduce our youth,” says Tomas Öhling of the employment office in Årby, pointing to a brand new white Mercedes idling in front of the library. ‘They’, those are drug dealers. While hling isn’t sure whether the driver in question is really a drug dealer, he alludes to the criminals’ tactics of recruiting bored youths.
Murat Tosun (39), who has lived in ‘vulnerable area’ Skiftinge for 36 years, agrees. “We have to do something about greed.” The youth in Skiftinge and Årby “must see a path to their own merits.” Parents of these young people often miss the connections with employers, says Tosun. “Drug gangs are jumping into that hole with branded clothes and expensive cars.”
Also read: Swedish police on gang violence: ‘Every death leads to another death’
He himself worked from the age of thirteen because he hated sitting at home. “Drugs weren’t such a big problem back then, but boredom and lack of role models were. I see that in our youth too.”
Making work attractive is exactly what Öhling strives for. In the summer he arranged ‘Sommarjobs’ for the youth, in the zoo or at a distribution company. But he has to admit that it is a drop in the ocean. “The young people went to these side jobs for a few hours every week. Whether that is sufficient?”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 10, 2022