Recently, it has been debated whether immigrants can be designated as a specific people group. This would make it possible to define a particular type of serious crime directed against immigrants as terrorist offenses. The Act on Criminal Offenses Act (2003:148) is one of the prerequisites for a crime to be defined as a terrorist offense that the crime should “injure serious fear of a population or population group” (2§). Above all, this debate was aroused when a prosecutor did not choose to prosecute terrorist offenses for an explosive attack carried out by supporters of the white power environment against a refugee settlement in Gothenburg in 2016. This because the above prerequisite was not considered to be met.

The question of defining the concept of public group I think is interesting. Defining immigrants as a public group becomes easily absurd as this would in principle mean dividing the world’s population into two categories, Swedes and non Swedes. But if we think about the concept of a people’s group from a slightly broader perspective, then the two sexes should be able to be groups of people. Men and women differ in a much more objective and tangible way than the categorization of Swedes and non Swedes. Although there are people who can be difficult to define based on this classification, in most cases it is easy to divide people after this division.

Why would this be interesting? Yes, because this could open up the possibility of defining violence against women by partners and former partners as terrorist offenses. In Sweden, 13 women are killed each year by partners or former partners and many women are being abused by these men. A National Survey shows that just over every fourth woman has ever been exposed to violence of this kind. This type of violence could then be defined as a terrorist offense based on the argument that this violence is structural, ideological and perhaps even racist (these men regard women as a lower standing race, which justifies the use of violence for the “growing purpose”). The individual motive for the crimes are to scare and control the female victim, which leads to a structural fear among women in general, including the fact that society shows that this violence is, in principle, permitted by allowing violence to continue year after year. Certainly, it is being spoken and written in the media about this type of crime, and there are often various projects in the police that are going to work on the problem, and some of the perpetrators are being laid up, but this will hardly help the women who come to be exposed to this violence, including the 13 women who will be murdered, next year, and next, etc …

This type of crime should be possible to define within the framework of the intentions of terrorist law, or? In addition, the number of victims of this type of crime is significantly higher than the victims of what we usually define as terrorist offense, both if we look to Sweden and to the rest of the world. When Sweden’s numbers are translated to other Western Europe, one can conclude that approximately 520 women are murdered each year by their partner or former partner, assuming that 13 percent of the Swedish murders are of this kind and about 4000 murders are committed in Western Europe each year. This is low. Then you have to add all those who are abused. Looking beyond Western Europe, these numbers increase dramatically. The threat level against this people group has to be called very high …

Recently, rape and sexual harassment on women have been the focus of the campaign #metoo. Even these crimes should be seen as part of the male population’s structural oppression, to dominate the other people group through threats and harassment. Even these crimes should therefore be able to be classified as terror-related.

But sometimes we focus on the wrong things. Why put down energy on a discussion of what should be regarded as terrorist offense? The important thing should be that we primarily prevent the crimes from being committed at all and, secondly, when failing to do so, to prosecute those who committed the crimes. It don´t really matter who is the offender, who is a victim or what the motive of the crime is.