One in Four Sex Offenders in Norway Last Year Had a Migrant Background, Study Finds
Corey Charlton, Daily Mail, February 25, 2016
One in four sex offenders convicted in Norway last year came from a migrant background, it has emerged.
Of the 399 people found guilty, 90 were either born inside or outside Norway to foreign parents.
The statistics emerge as countries throughout the EU struggle to cope with social problems caused by hundreds of thousands of migrants entering Europe.
The study, conducted by Norway’s TV2, involved analysing all the judgments handed down in the country’s courts last year.
Kristian Gundersen, a professor at the University of Oslo, told the paper: ‘It’s not necessary one’s ethnic background that can accurately explain these figures.
‘It could be finances, it could be age, in this case it is almost exclusively men, so you can’t bring in gender but these are the kinds of factors you must take into account.’
Migrants from Muslim countries have been involved in a handful number of high profile sex attacks in recent months.
In Belgium, an Afghan migrant aged 16 is accused of raping a worker at a refugee centre just two weeks after undergoing a course on how to treat women.
Police say the 16-year-old followed the catering firm worker into the basement of the centre in Menen, Belgium, and attacked her.
A spokesperson for the Red Cross later claimed the teenager was thought to have been watching the girl some time prior to the attack.
In Austria, an Iraqi man is alleged to have raped a 10-year-old boy at a public swimming pool because of a ‘sexual emergency’.
And in Cologne, Germany, more than 800 women filed police reports alleging they were sexually assaulted during New Year’s Eve celebrations in the city square.
The attacks occurred during out-of-control celebrations in the city’s main square. More than 800 women filed police complaints in the following weeks.
Police at the scene took notes describing being overwhelmed by drunken mobs of men and dozens of emotional victims claiming they had been assaulted.
Most accused men of ‘North African or Arab’ appearance as having carried out the attacks, and described being forced to run a ‘gauntlet’ of men groping them.
So far only 14 people have been charged by police. One faced a sexual assault charge, the rest are accused of theft.