As a journalist who examines extreme environments, you occasionally come across stories that for various reasons cannot be published. Mostly because they cannot be substantiated as true, sometimes because the victims themselves for some reason do not want the matter to be made public.
These are the stories that, more than any other, stay with you long after you look away. The ones that didn't get an end.
In all the years I've been scrutinizing the Swedish far-right, there have been women who have contacted me to tell me how badly they've been treated - not because they wanted me to share their stories, but because they trusted that I wouldn't.
Trusting a journalist with a pronounced grudge against the movement you belong to is taking a huge risk. The fact that they did it anyway says something about the environment they were in. It felt safer to put their future in the hands of a political enemy than to make themselves vulnerable to their own.
When I read Linn Jönsson's review in DN of Ungsvenskarna, I think of a young girl whom I used to urge to seek support outside the party, because I knew it was hopeless to urge her to leave it. The stories of sexual harassment, molestation and violence are horrific, but also – for anyone who has dug deeper into the party culture of the Sweden Democrats – uncomfortably familiar.
Already in 2013, the party was shaken by several high-profile cases. Two of the women testified about harassment, and were frozen out or lost their jobs after speaking up. The accused were then released back into the heat. An internal security report dismissed the six women under scrutiny as "sick" and "troubling" security risks with "immoral lives". The report also described how the party wanted to prevent the police from getting involved.
In 2017, Riksdag member Hanna Wigh left the party, with a story about how she was sexually assaulted and smeared when she sought support. The designated man denied the allegations, and the preliminary investigation was dropped.
When Kristina Winberg drew attention to Peter Lundgren's molestation by a party colleague in 2019, she lost her place on the EU list. Lundgren was allowed to stay, but was sentenced for the crime in 2021.
Earlier this year, I wrote the report "Men who hate women" for the Expo foundation, about how misogyny works as a political organizing force in the far right. In it, I use the philosopher Kate Manne's definition of misogyny: a system that rewards women who follow the gender order, and punishes those who break it.
This is how one must understand the pattern of attacks against women who have protested within SD over the years. For every woman who sees another lose their livelihood or community, there is a lesson about what it can cost to speak up yourself.
At the same time, Ungsvenskarna's chairman Denice Westerberg argues that men and women should have different roles in society, and wants to raise the status of the housewife and the traditional family ideal. In short: men must defend the nation, women give birth to the next generation.
Of course, this does not mean that she accepts abuse, but the rhetoric places women's self-determination in an ideological context that cannot be explained away as the bad judgment of individual men.
For some of the stories I carried, DN's review may have meant some sort of end. But as long as the party remains and its ideology does not fundamentally change, I suspect we have more chapters to look forward to.
