Response to interpellation 2023/24:655 on violence in close relationships
Translated from Swedish by AI; the translation may contain errors. The Swedish text is the original.
Summary AI, written in advance
L argues that it is crucial to stop violence in young people's relationships 1 and that the government has tasked authorities to strengthen the work 1. L emphasizes that smartphones and violence pornography affect young people's norms 1 and that the government is working to secure funding for civil society organizations 1 2. L allocates more money in its budget than previous governments have regarding men's violence against women 2 and argues that the government is working with concrete measures, such as that the National Board of Forensic Medicine shall map knowledge on strangulation 2. C argues that violence is increasing and that more information and support for young people is needed 3. C argues that it is devastating if the support line is closed due to uncertain funding 3 4. S argues that a national support line where young people can vent their issues is important 5. S doubts that the money will be available for the support line to be able to continue 6.
Written by AI in advance and may contain errors. The numbers lead to the speech a statement builds on; check against the text below.
Statsrådet Paulina Brandberg (L)
Madam Speaker! Helena Vilhelmsson has asked me in what way I and the government intend to work to curb violence and vulnerability in young people's relationships, and in what way I am prepared to secure the national support line ungarelationer.se and its survival in both the short and long term.
I would like to begin by thanking the interpellor for her commitment to this important issue.
Counteracting violence in young people's relationships is a central and important part of the work to prevent and combat men's violence against women, other forms of violence in close relationships, and honor-related violence and oppression. The Government has therefore tasked several agencies with strengthening that work.
The Gender Equality Authority has been tasked with mapping and disseminating information about violence in young people's relationships, as well as supporting violence prevention measures aimed at young people in relationships. The Swedish National Agency for Education has been tasked with preventing, detecting, and addressing men's violence against women, including violence in young people's relationships and honor-related violence and oppression.
The National Board of Health and Welfare has reviewed and granted grants to the foundation 1000 Möjligheter, which operates the support line ungarelationer.se, in accordance with the Ordinance (2022:257) on state grants to women's and girls' shelters and certain other non-profit organizations within the field of crime victims. The National Board of Health and Welfare's decision includes a position in a case concerning the exercise of authority in an individual case which I, as minister, cannot comment on.
In conclusion, I want to say that in order to prevent and combat violence against women in the short and long term, it is crucial to stop violence in young people's relationships.
Helena Vilhelmsson (C)
Madam Speaker! Thank you, Minister, for the answer!
Men's violence against women - this eternal pandemic - plagues us. It is one of our time's greatest societal problems. The recent development, with several murders of women and girls during the first months of the year, is appalling.
A new report from Jämställdhetsmyndigheten and Stiftelsen Allmänna Barnhuset shows that violence in young people's romantic relationships and honor-related violence and oppression are increasing in Sweden. The study shows that every third ninth-grader who has dated or had a relationship has been subjected to violence by their partner - every third person!
Violent pornography contributes to unhealthy sexual relations where both boys and girls are expected to comply with things they do not want to or are comfortable performing.
Violent behavior does not occur when one is an adult and is in a relationship. Men do not suddenly decide one day that they are going to start hitting. Nor do teenage boys wake up one day and say: "Today I am going to try strangulation sex." No, men's violence against women begins with boys' violence against girls. Norms, values, easily accessible violent pornography, lack of legislation - everything contributes to the violence creeping further down in age.
The need for information, guidance, and support for young people who are vulnerable cannot be overemphasized. Age-appropriate information and conversations can take place early, all so that young people get the tools to say no to things they are not comfortable with and that consent must always be present.
Under the January Agreement, our parties - Liberalerna and Centerpartiet - contributed to the launch of the operation ungarelationer.se. I look forward with dread that Liberalerna might contribute to it being forced to shut down. The risk exists, and I will return to that. Due to missing announcements regarding funding, the operation is indeed at risk of being closed after the turn of the year.
I have asked the minister questions about this before and received the same answer, that the minister cannot interfere in Socialstyrelsen's decisions and cannot engage in the exercise of public authority. That is quite correct, but I have not specifically asked what the minister thinks about Socialstyrelsen's decision to only grant half a million kronor in support instead of 5 million kronor.
I have not requested or thought that the minister should engage in the exercise of authority, but I am asking what the government intends to do so that young people in Sweden will have access to a support line, just as women exposed to violence have and just as men who hit have. Men's violence against women, in fact, begins with boys' violence against girls, regardless of whether the government or its ministers engage in the exercise of authority or not.
The fact is that I have received some more answers this time. The Minister for Gender Equality says that the Gender Equality Authority and the Swedish National Agency for Education have been tasked to map and disseminate information about violence in young people's relationships and to prevent, detect, and address violence in young relationships. That is good, and it is also time that the authorities receive that assignment because they may have to take over an operation that is forced to shut down after the half-year mark – a functioning operation that does exactly this.
I am sincerely concerned and want to know what the government intends. Will the government on Monday, when the year-end budget is presented, allocate funds so that the preventive work against men's violence against girls can continue? How will it be done in that case? If the answer remains the same as so far, that is to say that different agencies have been given assignments, I would like to know in what way the government intends for the work to take place under the auspices of Jämställdhetsmyndigheten and Statens skolverk. The answer today is unfortunately thin and does not match what the national support line does today.
Sofia Amloh (S)
Madam Speaker! I thank Member Vilhelmsson for a very important interpellation and for the opportunity to discuss it in the chamber today.
I want to particularly emphasize the need for what is raised in the interpellation, namely that there is a national support line for young relationships. It is about young adults being able to vent, discuss, and ask questions about what constitutes a good or bad relationship. One perhaps actually does not know that today. There needs to be a support line and a way to ask those questions, and ungrarelationer.se is currently actually the only option when it comes to providing that support.
What I primarily want to highlight in today's debate is that one is not only talking about what is wrong, bad, or unhealthy in relationships, but also highlighting what a good and healthy relationship looks like. It is incredibly important to show examples of how it can be - how it perhaps should be, that is to say exactly what everyone perhaps should get to experience. I think that approach is particularly important here.
Then I also understand that, just as the interpellator has clarified, it is not about interfering with an individual agency decision but about what conditions exist for young people to continue to have the contact that currently exists. How can it continue to exist? I think it is important that the Minister ensures it. So my question is: In what way does the Minister intend to ensure it?
Statsrådet Paulina Brandberg (L)
Madam Speaker! I want to begin by underlining the importance of us talking about these issues, and I truly want to sincerely thank you for the interpellation. I believe, in fact, that violence in young relationships is something that we need to focus much more on. When we talk about men's violence against women, I can sometimes experience that we talk about it as an adult problem, but the most important measures are those that must be directed towards the young generation.
It is also important to remember that youth and youth relationships have changed a lot in recent years. The explanation is smartphones. These have completely changed everyone's world and not least our young people and what their relationships look like. Young people today have access to social media that influences the norms and values that govern their perspectives very much. For example, jealousy can be seen as something romantic even though it is about controlling behavior. In many cases, the negative norms that we try to counteract in other ways in society are reinforced.
We also know that our young people, through smart phones, have completely unlimited access to pornography, including violent pornography. There we see that particularly choking is something that has become more and more commonly occurring as a normality in young relationships. At the same time, we have seen how deaths in young relationships have become an increasing problem - and we see that precisely the choking violence is one of the factors that makes the violence continue to be so deadly.
Through their phones, our young people also have the opportunity to keep track of each other in their relationships. They share Snapchat maps with each other as a natural part of being in a relationship, and thus one can have one hundred percent oversight of where one's partner is at any given moment. This is something that is new compared to how it looked just a few years back in time, and I experience that there is a knowledge gap in today's adult world - parents, school staff, and all people who move around children - when it comes to seeing and being able to work with the right methods regarding this.
I have more points to go into regarding the government's measures, but when it comes specifically to the financing, I share the interpellant's view that it is important to ensure funding for precisely those civil society organizations that work specifically with violence in young relationships. Here, the support line ungarelationer.se does incredibly important work; I really want to emphasize that.
The government is currently working on finding ways to ensure funding for the organizations that focus specifically on youth's relationships, and I will return with an announcement regarding how this will be concretized. I hope to be able to provide that announcement in the near future.
Helena Vilhelmsson (C)
Madam Speaker! I thank the Minister for the answer.
What will happen if this activity ceases is, in addition to children and young people losing their rightful support, that staff will be laid off and specialized expertise will be lost. Children and young people will therefore not be guaranteed the same right to support as adults who commit violence against children, as ungarelationer.se today is actually the only national equivalent to NCK's support line or the Välj att sluta-line, which is aimed at men who hit.
Ungarelationer.se started in 2019. At the same time, the Välj att sluta-line was opened as a pilot project by county administrative boards with the Manscentrum foundation as the operator, which is exactly how ungarelationer.se has functioned. The difference is that the funding for the Välj att sluta-line is secured today.
When ungarelationer.se started, a survey was conducted in the reference group, and a clear request from the young people was that there should be support via chat, anonymously. Other requests were that the person operating the activity should not feel like an authority and that it should feel youth-oriented. After the launch, ungarelationer.se was funded through a government mandate to Jämställdhetsmyndigheten, which continued in 2022.
Then we got a new government, and a new state grant took shape that was intended to encompass all violence prevention work. What happened, however, was that the grant to ungarelationer.se was significantly reduced because, among other things, research was to be prioritized. Consequently, ungarelationer.se remained unfunded during 2023 - until a government decision specifically regarding funding for the second half of the year was made in September 2023.
It is naturally understandable - I will continue with some technical questions regarding financing - that during the initial period of a support line, it is not completely clarified who will be responsible for the financing and how it will be secured in the long term. But after five years, one thinks that this should have landed. It is of great importance that the financing issue is resolved so that there continues to be stable and sustainable support for the target group.
As said, the "Choose to Stop" line is now under the National Board of Health and Welfare as a mission. The Manscentrum Foundation is the provider. That is resolved, and that is exactly how it could work here. The authority could be the Gender Equality Authority or the National Board of Health and Welfare, and the 1000 Möjligheter Foundation is the provider that runs the line.
Before 2024, there was a hope that the support line's activities could be financed within the aforementioned new state grant. But when the decisions arrived, it turned out that this will not be the case. Unfortunately, it is also not possible to read in Socialstyrelsen's decision why they have granted half a million instead of 5 million. One guess is that it was a necessity in order to be able to cover the distribution to all organizations that qualify according to the new regulation.
Again: We cannot discuss the Socialstyrelsen's decision, but we can discuss how the government intends to guarantee and secure the rightful support for young people living in a threatening, uncomfortable, or violent relationship. If the conditions for functioning operations today are changed to such a mild degree that they are jeopardized, the responsibility falls on the government.
My question then is: What do you do instead? I hope that by next Monday, when the budget arrives, I will find out how you intend to solve this. The fact is that ungarelationer.se, during its five years, has had over 15,000 specific chat contacts and received more than 1.3 million page views. There is an enormous amount of cooperation with national agencies, the Swedish Police Authority, and municipalities. It would be devastating if they cannot continue, and it is devastating that the funding is not secured.
Sofia Amloh (S)
Madam Speaker! Member Vilhelmsson highlighted in an exemplary manner how important this support line has been during the five years it has been in operation, and we have emphasized this several times in the debate. I am completely convinced that the Minister is well aware and possesses good knowledge of this support line and of how important these issues are; I believe she also demonstrated this in her second contribution. I do not doubt for a second that the Minister both possesses the knowledge and sees this as something prioritized.
What I doubt is that the money will be available for this type of support line to be able to continue. This is a unique support line that has existed for five years and for which there is no alternative. It is about there being money to give these associations the opportunity to continue to exist. A hard prioritization must be made, but I hope that the money will be available. The Minister stated that there is an intention to solve this, and I can only place my hope on that; there are many with me who are doing just that right now.
Statsrådet Paulina Brandberg (L)
Madam Speaker! Money is needed so that we can prevent and combat men's violence against women, violence in close relationships, and honor-related violence and oppression, and that includes, of course, violence in young relationships. This government allocates more money in its budget than previous governments have done regarding the sixth gender equality sub-goal: men's violence against women, which includes these areas.
For 2024, we have allocated 600 million kronor. These are, of course, funds that go partly to civil society, partly to research, and partly to municipalities and regions – different actors who are completely necessary pieces of the puzzle in this work. Civil society is a completely crucial piece of the puzzle. This is not something that politics can solve entirely on its own. Nor can our authorities or our municipalities and regions do it. No single actor can reverse the development and solve the problem; instead, all actors are completely necessary in the work. We need to have funding for all these actors.
I can only fully agree with what has been said regarding ungarelationer.se and their very important work. I know that they are making an incredible effort in the work of preventing and combating violence in young relationships and that they have the competence required to be able to handle the issue in the best way. It is precisely because we need to place a really important focus on organizations that work with young relationships that we within the government have a task to see how we can secure that part better than what has been done so far so that we can get all the pieces of the puzzle in place.
In addition to funding, the government is also working on concrete measures to address this issue. In my previous contribution, I spoke about the violence among young people. I want to dwell a bit on that, because it is something that concerns me very much.
When we look at the statistics, we see that the year has started incredibly darkly, with twelve suspected murders of women and girls in just the first three months of the year. It is, of course, very depressing. If we look over time, we see a generally downward trend regarding lethal violence against women, but we do not see that trend in young relationships. We see a clear line at 25 years; for those under 25 years of age, we see an increased risk of being subjected to lethal violence.
There is a report from the Karolinska Institute which shows that strangulation is the most common method in fatal partner violence and that there is twice as high a risk for younger women to be killed by strangulation as for women who are older than 25. I am therefore pleased that the government, as one of many measures, has tasked the National Board of Forensic Medicine with mapping and compiling existing knowledge on strangulation, including when it occurs in sexual contexts. The National Board of Forensic Medicine shall, on the one hand, improve the agency's internal knowledge base and, on the other hand, disseminate the knowledge to the authorities of the judicial system. I believe this is an important measure to address the most serious violence in young relationships.
Helena Vilhelmsson (C)
Madam Speaker! The annual initiative "Svartsjuka är inte romantiskt" (Jealousy is not romantic) is conducted by the police, the county administrative boards, ungarelationer.se, and the Gender Equality Authority. It is an initiative that would not have worked if ungarelationer.se did not exist. The campaign "Måste man gå med på strypsex?" (Do you have to agree to choking sex?), which is based on one of the most common questions the support chat receives, scares and touches. It is precisely these questions, which the government and Paulina Brandberg talk so much about, that ungarelationer.se works with.
I do not doubt the intentions, but it is very strange that the funding in April 2024 is not secured despite these facts. As previously mentioned, it is understandable that the funding form for a national activity is not in place from the start. But several different ways have been tried since 2022. The interruptions and short-sightedness harm and risk the activity. It is not just about the support line but about all national agencies that cooperate with this activity.
In a municipal survey with 185 respondents, almost 80 percent of the municipalities state that they are aware of ungarelationer.se, and 60 percent say that they make use of material and activities from ungarelationer.se.
In light of all this that the minister is telling us about and that we all know regarding the development that has occurred this year, which is appalling, there is still, in April 2024, no stable funding for the support line. There is for Sluta slå and Välj att sluta för män, and there is for Kvinnofridslinjen. But there is not for ungarelationer.se.
There does not seem to be any plan B. Men's violence against women begins with boys' violence against girls. That is where interventions have a real effect.
Statsrådet Paulina Brandberg (L)
Madam Speaker! I am pleased that we among Sweden's parliamentary parties have a consensus. I perceive it as such that we have a broad consensus on the importance of addressing men's violence against women, violence in close relationships, and honor-related violence and oppression. We see the need to direct focus toward young relationships. We need to do this not only in words but also in action.
As I said in my second post, the government is working to strengthen the work both with money and with concrete measures. Concrete assignments have been given to Jämställdhetsmyndigheten, Rättsmedicinalverket and Skolverket. We are making efforts from several different sides to strengthen the work.
Every time a young person can be prevented from becoming a victim or a perpetrator of a crime, it is an incredibly great victory for that person and for the continued lives of many other people. Just as the interpellor says, men's violence against women begins with boys' violence against girls. If one learns to become a perpetrator at a young age, it will create so much suffering throughout life for so many different involved parties.
I would like to thank you again for the debate. I will, as I said, return with a decision regarding the funding in this matter.
Source: The Swedish Parliament. The speeches come from the open data of the Riksdag, translated into English by AI, which may contain errors.