Sweden's Dark Soul:The Unravelling of a Utopia. Kajsa Norman.
Hurst Publishers. 2019. 240 pages.

The Swedish establishment is emotionally invested in presenting Sweden as a successful, socially liberal, post-national utopia. As this image becomes harder to maintain, the establishment needs not only to confront citizens’ actual problems but it must also, more importantly, deal with the issue of who they are. If your Swedish identity depends on being part of a national utopian project, who are you when utopia unravels? This is the background to Kajsa Norman’s book Sweden’s Dark Soul.

Norman starts the book depicting hundreds of sexual violations of girls in their teens, and younger, during the “We Are Stockholm” festival in the summer of 2015. Despite hundreds of witnesses and police reports, the media did not report on the crimes committed at the festival, which was funded by the local government and took place only a few hundred yards from parliament and the royal castle. Norman interviews a psychologist who saw girls harassed and violated by groups of men. She describes how eyewitness tried, and failed, to persuade Sweden's largest daily to cover the matter.

The newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, has refused to acknowledge its...