Talk

Unflip

Feminism: sex and gender

Feminism: chat

Women being silenced in Sweden

3 replies

mynameisnotkate · 17/03/2022 14:52

This has absolutely shocked me. I'm not sure if the article is behind a paywall; apologies if so: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/15/opinion/cissi-wallin-fredrik-virtanen-metoo-sweden.html

In Sweden, you can be convicted of defamation not only for saying something untrue about someone, but also if it is judged not to be in the public interests for it to be in the public domain, whether it is true or not. This woman, Cissi Wallin, posted on social media about being drugged and raped by a prominent man in the media, and has been convicted of defamation and may be jailed not because this has been proved not to be true (many other women have also come forward about this man) but because the court decided that he was not a sufficiently public figure for it to be justifiable to talk about this in public, and that her free speech was not being curtailed because she could still talk to her family, close friends and therapist about it!

Another young woman has been convicted of defamation for talking about her rape by a mainstream comedian in a closed Facebook group for rape survivors, even though her post caused several other victims of the same man to come forward.

This is a terrible situation for these women, and for Swedish women in general - how could anyone speak up under these circumstances?

OP posts:

Report

Delphinium20 · 20/03/2022 22:34

@GoodnessTruthBeauty

I totally agree of course, although the NYT are comolete hypocrites as they are fully on board with Gender Ideology and never give women's side of the story. Totally silent on Lia (Will) Thomas for example. They aren't doing any investigative journalism into the danger so trans medicine in kids etc.
Its much easier to safely point fingers from afar for them.

Yes. This article is excellent but still waiting on them covering gender issues from a feminist perspective.

Report

MangyInseam · 20/03/2022 19:25

Sweden seems in general to have an approach that put a lot more emphasis on what is seen as profitable for society at large, rather than individuals.

That being said, am I right in understanding that people could still pursue these instances legally? Because you could turn it around and say, rather than it not being proven that it didn't happen, it hasn't been proven that it did. So the law basically says you can't go around making serious accusations in the public eye?

There's a lot that could be said about the balance that's needed by this kind of thing, but we can see where such instances have gone wrong, for example the case of the Rolling Stone article where a female university student basically waged a campaign against another university student, following him around and such, and also went to the media about it. It turned out to be false, but it significantly impacted the guys life as you might expect. Someone like that might reasonably say - a court hasn't even looked at this. I am not some public figure like Bill Clinton or whatever - why should my life be ruined because someone decides to accuse me in a setting where I can't really defend myself?