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By Ruth Alexander BBC News
The Julian Assange extradition case has put Sweden's relatively high incidence
of rape under the spotlight. But can such statistics be reliably compared from
one country to another?
Which two countries are the kidnapping capitals of the world?
Australia and Canada.
Official figures from the United Nations show that there were 17 kidnaps per
100,000 people in Australia in 2010 and 12.7 in Canada.
That compares with only 0.6 in Colombia and 1.1 in Mexico.
So why haven't we heard any of these horror stories? Are people being grabbed
off the street in Sydney and Toronto, while the world turns a blind eye?
No, the high numbers of kidnapping cases in these two countries are explained
by the fact that parental disputes over child custody are included in the
figures.
If one parent takes a child for the weekend, and the other parent objects and
calls the police, the incident will be recorded as a kidnapping, according to
Enrico Bisogno, a statistician with the United Nations.
Comparing crime rates across countries is fraught with difficulties - this is
well known among criminologists and statisticians, less so among journalists
and commentators.
Sweden has the highest rape rate in Europe, author Naomi Wolf said on the BBC's
Newsnight programme recently. She was commenting on the case of Julian Assange,
the Wikileaks founder who is fighting extradition from the UK to Sweden over
rape and sexual assault allegations that he denies.
Is it true? Yes. The Swedish police recorded the highest number of offences -
about 63 per 100,000 inhabitants - of any force in Europe, in 2010. The
second-highest in the world.
This was three times higher than the number of cases in the same year in
Sweden's next-door neighbour, Norway, and twice the rate in the United States
and the UK. It was more than 30 times the number in India, which recorded about
two offences per 100,000 people.
On the face of it, it would seem Sweden is a much more dangerous place than
these other countries.
But that is a misconception, according to Klara Selin, a sociologist at the
National Council for Crime Prevention in Stockholm. She says you cannot compare
countries' records, because police procedures and legal definitions vary
widely.
"In Sweden there has been this ambition explicitly to record every case of
sexual violence separately, to make it visible in the statistics," she says.
"So, for instance, when a woman comes to the police and she says my husband or
my fiance raped me almost every day during the last year, the police have to
record each of these events, which might be more than 300 events. In many other
countries it would just be one record - one victim, one type of crime, one
record."
The thing is, the number of reported rapes has been going up in Sweden - it's
almost trebled in just the last seven years. In 2003, about 2,200 offences were
reported by the police, compared to nearly 6,000 in 2010.
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Naomi Wolf on the naming of rape accusers
So something's going on.
But Klara Selin says the statistics don't represent a major crime epidemic,
rather a shift in attitudes. The public debate about this sort of crime in
Sweden over the past two decades has had the effect of raising awareness, she
says, and encouraging women to go to the police if they have been attacked.
The police have also made efforts to improve their handling of cases, she
suggests, though she doesn't deny that there has been some real increase in the
number of attacks taking place - a concern also outlined in an Amnesty
International report in 2010.
"There might also be some increase in actual crime because of societal changes.
Due to the internet, for example, it's much easier these days to meet somebody,
just the same evening if you want to. Also, alcohol consumption has increased
quite a lot during this period.
"But the major explanation is partly that people go to the police more often,
but also the fact that in 2005 there has been reform in the sex crime
legislation, which made the legal definition of rape much wider than before."
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If I punch somebody and the person eventually dies, some countries can consider
that as an intentional murder, others as a manslaughter
Enrico Bisogno UN statistician
The change in law meant that cases where the victim was asleep or intoxicated
are now included in the figures. Previously they'd been recorded as another
category of crime.
So an on-the-face-of-it international comparison of rape statistics can be
misleading.
Botswana has the highest rate of recorded attacks - 92.9 per 100,000 people -
but a total of 63 countries don't submit any statistics, including South
Africa, where a survey three years ago showed that one in four men questioned
admitted to rape.
In 2010, an Amnesty International report highlighted that sexual violence
happens in every single country, and yet the official figures show that some
countries like Hong Kong and Mongolia have zero cases reported.
Evidently, women in some countries are much less likely to report an attack
than in others and are much less likely to have their complaint recorded.
UN statistician Enrico Bisogno says surveys suggest that as few as one in 10
cases are ever reported to the police, in many countries.
"We often present the situation as kind of an iceberg where really what we can
see is just the tip while the rest is below the sea level. It remains below the
radar of the law enforcement agencies," he says.
Naomi Wolf has also written that Sweden has the lowest conviction rate in
Europe.
She was relying on statistics from a nine-year-old report, which calculated
percentage conviction rates based on the number of offences recorded by the
police and the number of convictions. But this is a problematic way of
analysing statistics, as several offences could be committed by one person.
Police car in Sweden Swedish police encourage rape victims to come forward
The United Nations holds official statistics on the number of convictions for
rape per 100,000 people and actually, by that measure, Sweden has the highest
number of convictions per capita in Europe, bar Russia. In 2010, 3.7
convictions were achieved per 100,000 population.
Though it's still the case, as Wolf pointed out to the BBC, that women in
Sweden report a high number of offences - and only a small number of rapists
are punished.
So there's a lot that official statistics don't tell us. They certainly don't
reveal the real number of rapes that happen in Sweden, or any other country.
And they don't give a clear view of which countries have worse crime rates than
others.
Rape is particularly complex, but you'd think it would be straightforward to
analyse murder rates across different countries - just count up the dead
bodies, and compare and contrast.
If only, says Enrico Bisogno. "For example, if I punch somebody and the person
eventually dies, some countries can consider that as an intentional murder,
others as a manslaughter. Or in some countries, dowry killings are coded
separately because there is separate legislation."
What's more, a comparison of murder rates between developed and less developed
countries may tell you as much about health as crime levels, according to
Professor Chris Lewis, a criminologist from Portsmouth University in the UK.
The statistics are to some unknown degree complicated by the fact that you're
more likely to survive an attack in a town where you're found quickly and taken
to a hospital that's well-equipped.