Othering the rapist: Rurality, sexual violence and the Bjästa case

Sweden is often presented as a 'gender-equal paradise', but the nation's gender-equality policies have had several unintended exclusionary consequences: rural men, alongside ethnic minorities, now constitute an exception to Sweden's national self-image. In order to present Scandinavia as a progressive centre in a globalised world (as in gender-equal and egalitarian countries), men who do not fit this self-image are often described as the 'other'. The highlighting of rural violence risks reinforcing perceptions of the countryside and its habitants as deviant. To avoid this scenario, we need to explore the social and cultural processes in which rural men are given both marginalised and privileged positions. Drawing on data from a school-based violence-prevention programme, we explore in this chapter how people discuss sexual violence in relation to a rape case in a small Swedish town; we also analyse a documentary, a motion picture and the media debate about the case. We argue that 'othering' works through an affective politics of disgust; in the classroom discussions, for example, people recurrently distinguished between 'us' and the rural other. Such othering is related to a history of the countryside as a peripheral place excluded from the modern urban Swedish project, which then enables the projection of negative affect towards rurality. This chapter discusses how sexual violence in the school-based Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) programme. Sweden has undertaken major efforts to combat sexual violence, particularly since the 1990s, when society came to view such violence as an expression of lack of gender equality. Sexual violence could thus lead to hierarchy reproduction when people argue that such violence is an essential expression of particular groups and places. According to the MVP programme manual, the rationale behind using the Bjasta case in the Swedish adaptation of the programme was to provide an example of severe sexual violence that everybody can take a stand against. Bjasta continued to be a deterrent example of how a community could turn against a rape victim. In order to avoid reinforcing stereotypes of rural inhabitants, exploring the specific intersections between rurality and gender that may cause violence and produce place-specific vulnerability is insufficient.