The Police of the Stockholm district of Södertörn have, over a period of 10years, kept secret records of thousands of women subjected to violence and domestic abuse. In the records, the police have collected sensitive and personal information on everything from physical and psychiatric diagnoses, drinking habits and personal details about their children and other close family members.
The Stockholm police registered women who contacted the police to report that they had been beaten and/or threatened. The secret records are full of sensitive data and offensive wording about the women.
Some say that ‘maybe the police had good intentions of putting the data in the register’, maybe they wanted to help the women ‘.
But what’s the point? Why keep records of women in this way – and outside of the regular police record keeping? And why these ‘home-made’ diagnoses and wording like ‘myth maniac’, ‘she is a tricky person’, religious affiliation, alcohol habits and other extremely private details?
Swedish National Radio report that police have dismissed criticism of the controversial records and said that they have been kept as a database to identify the perpetrators.
This despite the fact that the records focus entirely on women’s characteristics, psychiatric diagnoses and background. No corresponding records of the men exist at all.
The women in these records are violated twice – they are violated once, and when seeking help, they are then violated again – by the authorities – the very thing supposed to support and help them.
The old, outdated idea and attitude of women in vulnerable situations is obvious in the way these records have been kept.
This is so terribly prejudiced and based on attitudes which should be a thing of the past – the attitude that the solution to violence against women lies with women themselves, not the man who beats.
It is completely the wrong focus – violence against women is about men who beat, and we must not forget that 16 women (in Sweden) are murdered every year by their spouse/other close relative, and thousands of women are living under, many times, lifelong threats and abuse – records like these won’t help these women the slightest.
One cannot but be concerned and worries over the fact that records like these may deter women living under threats and violence to report to the police.
This is not the kind of society that we want – women should not have to be exposed to, and subjected to even more and continued ‘punching’ (physically, mentally, emotionally) when they – many times in life-threatening situations – are seeking help from the authorities and from the police.
This story broke last week in Swedish media and there is an absolute outcry among Swedish citizens about the way these thousands of women have been treated.
The secret records and the story were uncovered by two investigative reporters and journalists at Swedish National Radio, Bo-Göran Bodin and Alexander Gagliano.
The image shows Swedish National Radio journalists Bo-Göran Bodin and Alexander Gagliano during their research work of the records that had been kept over a period of 10 years by Swedish police over women who had been subjected to domestic violence and abuse.
Photo: Pablo Dalence, Swedish National Radio.
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