In the small Swedish city of Örebro, guns are so easy to come by that social services say most of the high-risk young people they work with in relation to youth crime could get hold of one in a day.
“The contacts are there if you want them. Drugs they could get even faster,” said Sabrina Farlblad at the city’s social services’ offices, where two years ago her team formed support groups for young people deemed at risk of becoming involved in violence.
So far the preventative approach appears to be working: as far as social services know, none of the young people who have attended the support groups have been involved in any shootings.
Illegal guns – largely from the Balkans, according to police – are relatively accessible in Sweden. As younger and younger children – some as young as 10 – are recruited into the drug trade, the number of them using guns in conflicts with deadly consequences is rising. Police fear it is only a matter of time before guns from Ukraine find their way to Sweden.
Recent figures showed the number of 15- to 17-year-olds prosecuted for serious crimes such as murder and attempted murder had risen to the highest level since 2019. In the first six months of this year there were 42 people in the age group suspected of attempted murder. This compares with 38 during the whole of 2022.
In the last few days there have been a number of deadly incidents in Sweden involving teenagers, including a boy in his early teens who was arrested after a man died in a shooting in the southern city of Helsingborg. In a separate case, two 14-year-old boys were found dead in forest areas, reportedly murdered because they did not do tasks on behalf of a criminal network.
The scale of the problem recently prompted the government to announce plans to make it easier for schools, social services and police to share information to stop young people being pulled into crime and identifying at risk children early. Around the country, various projects and techniques are being trialled to try to stem the violence, such as the scheme in Örebro, which lies between Stockholm and Gothenburg.
As well as the support groups, Örebro also deploys the group violence intervention (GVI) approach, which involves continuously updating a police intelligence map tracking people involved or socially associated with violent crime.
At the support meetings, the main message is “we don’t want you to be killed”, said Johanna Sollerman, a crime prevention strategist for the municipality. The young people are told that if they perpetuate violence they will be hit from every angle from social services to the tax office.
So far this year there has been one deadly shooting in Örebro, compared with four in 2021, when shootings took place on playgrounds and in front of a kindergarten.
Evin Cetin, a youth crime expert and lawyer, said conflicts were largely centred around drugs and who had power over particular areas.
“The government must ask themselves the question: can we crack gang crime, which recruits child soldiers, without cracking the narcotics business, which is worth billions?” she said.
Rather than focusing on punishing the children selling drugs, more emphasis should be placed on those buying them from young people, Cetin said. This sentiment was echoed on Sunday by the former Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson who called for those who buy drugs from children to be imprisoned. “It is about protecting our young and society,” the Social Democrat leader said.
Cetin said that unlike in most parts of Europe, where distribution was run by a top-down organisation led by older men, in Sweden 16- and 17-year-olds buy half a kilogram of cocaine on loan and get younger children to sell it. “That is why we see these shootings,” she said.
She has met 22-year-olds who have been in the drug trade for 10 years: “They talked about themselves like they were elderly. I could meet 18-year-olds who had 40 children under them selling narcotics.”
Some observers in Sweden say the problem lies with a legal system that punishes the under-18s less severely for serious crime. But Cetin said the fault lay with successive governments and the police who had failed to heed a warning in 2010 by the youth crime expert –now police commissioner – Carin Götblad that 5,000 children and young people were on a pathway towards serious crime.
Those children, who were then 12, 13 and 14 years old, are now leading figures in gang crime, said Cetin. She said every time a child or young person left criminality through death or a prison sentence someone else was recruited. “And this is the big problem. You can lock up as many as possible, but new children will still come,” Cetin added.
Widening social and economic inequalities were motivating factors for children to start selling drugs, she said, especially for young boys failing at school in vulnerable areas with high levels of unemployment.
“When I talk to young guys, what I notice is that they have no self-belief … They don’t have any dreams,” Cetin said.
Götblad, who has worked in youth crime her entire career, said the age of young people who carried and fired guns was falling.
Overall, crime among young people was going down, she added, but there was a small group who had started getting involved in much more serious crime, particularly teenagers from immigrant backgrounds who lived in overcrowded housing.
“They are fighting about narcotics because it’s worth a lot of money,” Götblad said. “There is a lot of cocaine from South America that comes direct to Sweden, [and then] sold … into Europe. This is what holds the conflicts together.”
A government report published this month, for which Götblad was a contributing expert, suggested children aged 15 to 17 who commit the most serious crimes should be imprisoned. In general, minors aged 15 and above can be sent to young offenders homes, but not prison.
Götblad said: “There needs to be many more corrective tools because we have a naïve society today. The society that our laws are made for and authorities, that doesn’t exist any more.”
There are multiple crime prevention programmes on the go, she said, with local authorities now required by law to make a prevention plan. Götblad added that it was important to support and help families early on.
In Järva, an area of Stockholm that has previously been strongly associated with violent crime, Semret Meskel from the community organisation Fryshuset Husby said shootings had recently levelled off because of a combination of substantial financial investment in preventative support and collaboration across services.
“Together we have created a united force which is very powerful,” she said.
Fryshuset tries to provide long-term support and a safe place for young people to go. As well as activities and events, it trains young people according to the principles of the dialogue for peaceful change (DPC), the conflict resolution programme founded in Northern Ireland.
The DPC leader, Samrand Faik, said the programme should be taught everywhere to help young people navigate day-to-day life: “We want our young people to be a voice for Järva and for young people in Swedish society.”
