Dozens of reported sexual assaults in and at We Are Sthlm , a youth festival in the Swedish capital Stockholm , were not publicized by the police. The Stockholm police had received 38 reports of sexual harassment at We Are Sthlm in and together, from female visitors at the festival, most of whom were under 15 years of age, [ 1 ] [ 2 ] but had not publicized these reported harassments in their press releases then.
We Are Sthlm was established as a summer music festival for youth in under the name "Ung08" with free yearly public concerts and events in central Stockholm. In , the festival was attended by , people and changed its name to "We Are Sthlm". In and together, 38 incidents of sexual harassment at We Are Sthlm were reported to the police by female visitors at the festival, most of whom were under 15 years of age, [ 1 ] but the Stockholm police did not publicize about these alleged harassments in their press releases then, [ 3 ] [ 4 ] also the assaults seem to not have been fully investigated.
In connection to the festival, Sveriges Radio in August reported that sexual harassment had occurred that year, and that festival had been plagued by the same problems for several years. Newspaper Dagens Nyheter on 10 January , during the commotion over the β16 New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany , had obtained internal documents from the police and wrote about what they now framed as a police cover-up of sex assaults.
Police spokesperson Varg Gyllander on 11 January suggested that the non-reporting in and had been ""self censorship" on the part of individual officers", as certain "police employees Wierup pointed to the similarity of the German assaults to reports of incidents in Kalmar and at the We Are Sthlm festival in August Wierup was critical of the absence of media attention and posed questions on the reasons for the lack of attention and what it meant for the safety of women in public spaces.
According to one memo, police in were told to be vigilant of young men sexually assaulting women in the crowd, as the previous year such offences had been committed, mostly by migrants, including Afghans. David Brax, a scholar of hate crimes at the University of Gothenburg , hypothesised that police were concerned there would be revenge attacks against other migrants if the crimes were made public, but also predicted that a cover-up would vindicate the far-right's belief that the media do not report on migrant crime.
