Hannu Niemi, a Justice Ministry researcher, says that crime rates by immigrants in Finland have been exaggerated by the media, report Länsi Uusimaa and Uusi Suomi. He believes that there is a political aim by some groups to cite national origin in crime statistics in order to label whole groups.
Migrant Tales spoke with Niemi in the spring, when an Aamulehti story written by a freelancer claimed that immigrants are overrepresented in rape crime statistics in Finland.
One of the matters that becomes clear from the Aamulehti story, as well as another one by A-Studio in August, is that both aim to label immigrants from certain regions like the Middle East as outright rapists.
Both stories place more emphasis on percentage figures rather than actual volumes, which are low. Apart from playing down or not mentioning that Finns commit the vast majority of rape crimes in this country, the A-Studio story went as far as to claim that the Iraqi community had “a problem” because it had the highest amount of rape suspects.
The total number of suspected rape cases by Iraqi immigrants was seven.
Niemi said that the number of rape crimes committed by immigrants is 1-2 per 1,000.
Even if it is clear that certain politicians and anti-immigration groups exaggerate rape and crime statistics for their own political purposes, there is an important factor missing that may shed light on why crime among 15-24 year olds is higher (over 1,600/10,000 immigrants) than among Finns (under 1,200/10,000) in the same age group. The missing factor is ethnic profiling by the police.
Here is a link that offers a comprehensive view of crimes committed by foreigners.
Are certain ethnic groups in Finland more likely to be stopped and arrested by the police than others?
Knowing the answer to this important question could shed light on the problem.
Niemi says that if the immigrant community’s age structure were the same as the Finns’, crime levels would be about the same in both groups.
We all know those who have been responsible for exaggerating crime statistics of immigrants to further their political aim and agenda. What happens now when it becomes wider knowledge that such claims have been a big lie?
One positive matter is that such politicians won’t be able to use such crime statistics as freely as they did in the past. Every time they use them they can be exposed for what they are: exaggerated lies.
I really don’t understand what you are trying to accomplish here. The statistics don’t lie, they are the truth.
And even if 7 is a low figure, it’s still very big number concerning there are not so many iraqis here in Finland.
It’s like you take Hannu Niemi’s comments as words of God, and that doesn’t make any sense. It’s only a twisted opinion of one individual.
And one blow to you reverse-racism complaining comes here: How many muslim men in Finland have been convicted of raping a muslim woman? And how many convicted of raping a white woman? There you have proof of their racism aswell. They are selecting their victims among white women, therefore not only committing rape, but a racially motivated rape. That is the worst form of racial hate crime that we have ever seen in Finland.
Farang, we take seriously what we write here in Finland. I believe I speak for the whole editorial board. We strongly believe, and Niemi reinforces it, that rape and other crime statistics are used by anti-immigration groups in Finland to discredit other groups with the sole purpose of making their lives as hard as possible in this country.
You really don’t make any sense, by your logic if some immigrants commit rape crime all immigrant groups belonging to those who committed the rape crime are rapist huh? well can we use same logics to native Finns? we all know many native Finns commit killings under the influnce of alcohol, so is’t fare to say in your logics that all Finns are prone to killings when they’re under in the influnce of alcohol and that we should wathout every drunk Finns that we see in everywhere perhaps if he might want to start killing us?
Farang
That is one hell of an accusation, Farang.
It is completely unsupported by the facts, though. Fact is, any rapist has a one in 10,000 chance of meeting a Muslim woman on the street, and much less in a bar, which are the two contexts in which a foreign rapist is likely to encounter their victim. And the number of crimes referred to here is 7, and because none involved a Muslim woman, you want to say the rapists are targeting Finnish women and it’s racially motivated rape!
Describing these rapes as ‘racial hate crime’ is itself a form of hate crime. It is an extremely serious defamation of immigrant groups that is completely unsupported, by either evidence or common sense. You are breaking Finnish Law right there, Farang, and I bet you don’t give a fuck, do you.
Likewise, you don’t care that you are stigmatising thousands of people because you are too lazy to even think through your own racist bullshit!
You are politicising rape and that is a massive betrayal of women and a trivialisation of the crime of rape. You are not bothered about victims, about the estimated 10,000 rape victims in Finland per year. No, you want to take seven of those rapes and use that to stigmatise an entire group of people. The effect of that stigmatisation is literally thousands of innocent victims. Do you care? Not a bit. Hate crime is about protecting people’s right to innocence and dignity, but you are quite happy to actively encourage people to make vile associations with national identity and ethnicity. And because the crime is rape, you think you can hide beyond a moral veil. You can always claim you are standing up for rape victims, which is crap. Because if you were bothered about ‘innocence’, you wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to start throwing the dirt!
Sick fuck!
Farang
You know fuck all about statistics, Farang, so just stop pretending you do. This was written by somebody who does know what they are talking about….try and learn something!
Crime rates based on small counts of crimes present two serious problems for least squares analysis. First, because the precision of the estimated crime rate depends on population size, variation in population sizes across the aggregate units will lead to violating the assumption of homogeneity of error variance. We must expect larger errors of prediction for per capita crime rates based on small populations than for rates based on large populations. Second, normal or even symmetrical error distributions of crime rates cannot be assumed when crime counts are small. The lowest possible crime count is zero, so the error distribution must become increasingly skewed (as well as more decidedly discrete) as crime rates approach this lower bound. As populations decrease, an offense rate of zero will be observed for a larger and larger proportion of cases. Thus, there is an effective censoring at zero that is dependent on sample size, which has considerable potential for biasing the resulting regression coef?cients. (Osgood, 2000)
It’s really deppressing that i as an vicible immigrant living in Finland is seen as a rapist even though ive never raped a woman never even crossed in my mind but now becus of the lies that’s been spread these past years in the Finnish media among some Finns has labeled me and some other vicible immigrants automaticaly as a rapist and that’s wrong, nobody borns as a rapist becus of his ethnicity. These lies are ubsurd and some Finns still continue to spread those lies to this day, i don’t know what’s their agenda but that is doing a damage to innocent people like me.
In nowhere I said such thing. If 10 % of population X is rapists, then 90 % of the population is not rapists. If 50 % of population is rapists, then 50 % are not.
There was no generalisations in my message, only statistics. Nobody is claiming that EVERY person of group X are rapists or criminals. These statistics are only used to compare different groups to find out if person in one group is statistically more likely to commit a crime. But we need to remember that no matter what statistics say, no person is a criminal unless he/she has actually committed a crime.
Farang, what statistics do you want to present? Show us the numbers.
You are missing the point: the whole idea, aim, motive of exaggerating and blowing out of proportion immigrant crime statistics is to brand them as something suspect.
You have found this out on Migrant Tales. I’m sorry that it may come as a shock to you.
Statistics are important for people for making personal risk analysis.
Let’s say a man approaches woman and asks if she wants to spend time with him. At this point, before woman gives an answer, she should perform risk analysis:
“What is the risk (eg. likelihood) of becoming raped, if I say yes?”
Now, if the man is from a group that statistically has low propability of committing rape, it’s safer to say yes. But if it looks like this person is very likely to rape her, she can say no and get away from the situation.
It’s all about safety of people. Even if it may offends someone’s feelings, people have every right to get all relevant information and act based on them to be as safe as possible.
Here’s one example, which is common sense, but still it may be offending for some people:
If you are walking alone and there are no other people around and you see a group of romanis walking towards you, it is common sense to run away, because you are likely to be assaulted, robbed, etc. It is prejudice but it is based on experience. When we were in school, this was taught to us by our teachers.
Why would you deny people the right to be safe?
Farang
Actually, what you are suggesting are two things that feminists have been heavily criticising men for – using rape as a way to both scare women into being suspicious and making them somehow responsible for it.
You are actually actively encouraging women to make a risk analysis, and in doing so you shift responsibility for the event of rape onto women, rather than even beginning to question what it is in men’s attitudes that leads them to rape.
Not only are you a rabid racist Farang, in blatantly seeking to stigmatize immigrants, but your fake pretence at protecting Finnish women reveals you to be a sexist bum to boot!
No intellectual person can think like that. Assessing a risk has nothing to do with responsibility. The responsibility of a rape is always 100% of the rapist, never the victim. If women wants to reduce the risk of being getting raped, it has nothing to do with the responsibility.
For example someone wants to reduce the risk of getting killed in plane crash and therefore never flies. Still if that person would fly and the plane would crash, it would not be his fault.
You thought you would be clever and transfer the discussion from the actual rapists to somekind of victim responsibility question, only to avoid the uncomfortable facts about rape statistics. But you failed.
Farang
So now you are lecturing to women about how they should see rape!! And your idea is that you can talk about risk and what WOMEN SHOULD be doing to avoid rape and yet you take no responsibility for how this makes women feel or about the subtle shift in responsibilities that takes place when you decide to do that. Then you make some flippant comparison with fear of flying. If both feet weren’t already far inside your own mouth, I’d suggest you did a walk.
Nothing in this debate makes me uncomfortable, Farang. If facts are ugly, they have to be faced. What I absolutely detest in this debate though is distortion. And you haven’t the first clue about statistics and yet you come here regularly to use statistics to make racist comments about immigrants in Finland. If you think I’m not going to respond to that, you are very mistaken!
Mark
Interesting twisting of statistics again from you. This number 7 was only iraqis, and now you are using that number to refer to all muslims 😀
There is no twist in the figures or argument I gave. It’s very simple and you cannot argue with it, so you call it a ‘twist’.
There is far far greater chance that a potential immigrant rapist would encounter a non-Muslim woman in Finland than a Muslim one. And in a small statistic involving only dozens, it is therefore completely unsurprising that there would not be a Muslim woman among the victims.
That you take this as proof that immigrants are targetting Finnish women for rape is absolutely unacceptable in a civilised debate or in the public arena, Farang. It is slanderous and extremely vile. It has huge implications for how immigrants are perceived in Finland and amounts to a vilification of immigrants. It is, plain fact, ILLEGAL. Not only that, it’s just plain wrong, immoral, unfair, unjust and disgusting. That you do not even stop for a second to consider properly the criticisms being made of your vile argument is yet more evidence, if we needed any, that you are seriously lacking in moral sense, Farang.
Mark
So, you are seriously defending rapists here. That tells everything necessary about you.
Let’s open this up:
A black man rapes white woman. I say that this is a racially motivated rape. In your opinion I am the criminal here.
Enough said.
Farang
So anyone that dares to question Farang’s extremely vile interpretation of the rape statistics is defending rapists? You are one nasty piece of work Farang.
And what if there were no black women? Idiot!!!
You are unbelievable. In cases where Finnish people assault immigrants, you are the first to claim that it was a racially motivated crime.
Can’t you see your bias here? No matter what happens, your opinion is always formed based on the ethnic background of the people involved. And you don’t even see that is’t the purest form of racism what you are doing.
In all you posts here, where white man has assaulted black man, you call it racism. But when black man has assaulted white man, you immediately start to find all other reasons that might be behind it. You can never accept that there exists also racism toward Finns by immigrants.
Farang
Absolute rubbish. I have never made such a stupid claim. Stop trying to make me look like an idiot equivalent to yourself.
Now you have completely reversed the argument. Gaslighting? You are the one claiming that if a black man rapes a white woman it must be a racially motivated rape. Your claim. Your mess. You clean in up, you morally spineless gimp!
Mark
So you seriously claim that immigrants don’t encounter with black women in Finland 😀 Go outside, man, and look around. There are as much black women out there as there are men.
Farang
Pigeon chess, my friend, pigeon chess!
Mark
I don’t say it MUST be, meaning 100% would be racially motivated. But I say that is one factor there, which explains that only white women get raped by muslim men.
I remember in other discussion you used similar defense: Because immigrants encounter more with white Finns, it is acceptable that they commit more crimes against white Finns. That is sick comment, because that comment implies that person will eventually commit a crime if he is just given enough opportunities to commit that crime. How can anyone think like that?
A law abiding citizen will not do a crime even if he is give 1000 opportunities each day. With your logic he would.
When talking about crimes by immigrants, you always try to find some other factor to blame the crime for, you never blame the immigrant himself. Why is that? DO you somehow see immigrants as victims?
–I don’t say it MUST be, meaning 100% would be racially motivated. But I say that is one factor there, which explains that only white women get raped by muslim men.
Rape convictions of immigrants is 0.0some percentage, in other words insignificantly small. And, as you know, the grand majority of rapes are committed by Finns.
Why do some politicians stretch the facts to suit their racism? Because without such lies they would be nothing. They would be unknown to us.
This study will help clear matters up for you:
Farang
Your claim is impossible to verify and based on the logic you offered to support it, completely unjustified. This is what you said:
There was no talk about ‘one factor’. And on top of that, it’s not a factor that is substantiated by any proof. It is by definition a vile slur on immigrants, the majority of whom would have to carry the stigma of such a publicly spread notion. I’m not interested in how rapists feel about any public reaction, but I am interested in the INNOCENT victims of this kind of slur campaign against immigrants, the ones living with the stigmatisation that it causes.
This is absolutely normal in discussions of crime rates among researchers, Farang, that rates must be adjusted for ‘opportunties to commit crime’.
Rubbish. That was never the argument, and if you are too lazy to figure out the real argument, that is your problem. I’ve put more than enough effort into cajoling your lazy arse into some kind of understanding. You have no understanding of statistics or arguments made in relation to them. You are an ignorant gimp who hides behind statistics to make racist arguments against immigrants in Finland, and you are supported in your prejudice by a great many others just like you.
Rubbish. I do not deny that immigrants can be criminal. Immigrants are a population much like any other, and so it would be very strange to claim that immigrants can do no wrong! But as usual, you are not one bit interested in understanding what I ACTUALLY THINK, and instead prefer to give out these false representations of my beliefs that are made entirely to make yourself look good in the face of criticism.
I have told you many times what i think and you ignore and prefer to lie about what I think. That is not a conversation, Farang. That is not even the beginning of a conversation.
Farang
I don’t think you understood this at the time and it’s clear now that you think this is a strong argument against me and have held on to it for that reason. You’ve repeated this argument several times now, so I think it’s time to put up or shut up.
I think you forget that in the process of modelling, WE set the rate of racism. Not because we believed a non-criminally motivated person would commit a crime, but just to test whether the per capita rate correctly reflected the rate of racism that WE HAD SET. It did not.
Per capita rates underestimated majority population rates of racism and therefore, by comparison over-inflated rates of racsim among minorities.
There was never an assumption that ‘innocent’ Finns would commit a crime if they only had more and more opportunities. What we did was set the rate for those that were already criminally motivated (racist) and factored in the opportunity.
This is a very normal thing to do in criminology. You seem surprised and you even call me ‘sick’ for suggesting it. You are being lazy. That’s not very Finnish, Farang.
Just to correct you, I never used an argument about crimes being ‘acceptable’. No crime is acceptable. The point was that racist crimes do not accurately reflect rates of racism in majority and minority populations, and if you compare these populations based on per capita rates, you will end up with a very distorted picture that underestimates rates of racism in the majority population.
This isn’t to say that we know what the rate of racism is, but rather we should be cautious before using per capita rates as a proxy for rates of racism. Indeed, even more so, we should NOT make any comparison between minority and majority populations based on per capita, and where per capita information is given, it should be made absolutely clear that doing so will skew the results.
It is exactly the same reasoning that is used to understand higher crime rates in cities compared to towns (per capita). Criminologists don’t suggest city people are inherently more criminal. It’s just common sense to say that crime requires three things 1) a person who is criminally motivated 2) has the skills to carry out a crime, and 3) has an opportunity to commit a crime.
This is really ABC stuff when it comes to criminology, so the fact that you are not convinced by it simply shows that you are not prepared to listen to what experts on crime have to say.
I’m not an expert, but I do have an open mind and I have the energy and motivation to learn. Perhaps if you showed a similar inclination, you wouldn’t be left having a half arsed view about life and immigration?
Here’s an interesting word I bumped into on urban dictionary: zonies.
Here’s the definition: What used to be referred to as White Supremecists, Aryans, or racialpurists are now referred to as Zonies. Zonies believe and expound all the usual White Aryan rhetoric when necessary but hide behind the term “Zonies” when posting on more traditional sites like newspaper commentary and mainstream blogs to help hide the main thrust of their beliefs.
What would the Finnish equivalent be? “Allut?”
This one is for you Farang!
So, as you tried to crawl out of this based on the hilarious claim that black rapists just don’t encounter black woman, here’s more evidence:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090326211319/http://ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/cvus05.pdf
It’s from US department of justice.
In year 2005, white men raped under 10 black women. In the same year black men raped over 37000 white women.
How would you like to explain this?
The problem here Farang is that you generalize and that lesson one on controlling your racism.
Or is your point to show that ALL blacks are rapists? Are all Finns alcoholics and pedophiles?
No. You made that assumption all by yourself.
My question to you was: How do you explain this difference in amount of rapes committed by white against black versus black against white? The difference is enormous, white raping black basically doesn’t exist.
Farang, I highly doubt you will even bother to find out. Crime is a complex matter that has to be studied from many perspectives. You cannot just group people and claim, “hey they’re all rapists.”
Certainly if you’d bother finding out, that could rock your world for good. It would never be the same because what your think no longer applies.