Our Norwegian correspondent The Observer has translated an article from VG.no about a subtle shift in the pattern of child muggings in the Oslo suburbs.

The translator provides some brief background information on the author of the article:

Aslak Nore is a member of the ‘clique’ of Norwegian liberals, and is influential in the media and social media. He is a former soldier and an author of spy novels, and somewhat of an intellectual darling of the cultural elite in Norway.

He is also the person who physically attacked Simen Sætre, the man who wrote the recently-published biography of Fjordman. Sætre was actually slapped in the face by Aslak Nore on stage at a literary event in Norway, because Nore felt that the author was rude to him. This incident received a lot of media attention in Norway at the time.

The translated article:

Similar children make better muggers

Once again Oslo is being haunted by a wave of child-muggings, but unlike in the past these muggings are a symptom of the ethnically segregated capital.

By Aslak Nore

Child-muggings. Back when I was growing up, the mere utterance of the word made parents shudder and teens sweat. Everybody had experienced being mugged; many even several times. It could happen on the subway, in the playground or in the city.

Muggings in Oslo West

It almost always occurred in the same manner: a bunch of guys would surround you. They would ask you what the time was. They would then insist on “frisking” you; for some reason they always chose to use the language of the police. Then you’d normally have no other option than to hand over your valuables. Did the muggers come from different cultural background? Yes, most of the time, but the victims also knew to be extra wary of the ethnic Norwegian members of the gangs because they always felt the need to prove themselves.

Lately I’ve been reading about a new wave of child muggings in Oslo. This spring an increasing number of child muggings have been reported to the police, and after a major crackdown, the police have finally managed to solve these cases. But the fear is still present amongst the youngsters in the affected neighborhoods. Young people talk about how to make themselves more inconspicuous and unattractive for the muggers, and claim that a stint in a police holding cell has become somewhat of a status symbol.

It seems to be a case of history repeating itself. From the mid 1990’s until today, we have heard of and in many cases even personally been affected by the waves of child muggings. Both the victims and the perpetrators have the same mentality as before.

Upon closer inspection, however, the recent waves of muggings differ from those in the past. The muggings of the past affected mostly children from the affluent areas of the western parts of Oslo. The usual hot spots were Bogstadsveien, Majorstuen and the subway stations in the west. At the turn of the millennium things got so bad that the police station at Majorstua launched “Operation Child Mugging”. That’s how they managed to solve the problem.

The recent wave of muggings has occurred on the other side of town. For all I know they probably still also occur on the west side, but the majority of the reported cases have occurred in the city center and in the eastern neighborhoods, in Bjerke and Stovner in Groruddalen. This is an sign of a new and disturbing trend.

Cleaned up

I was living in New York City when I first started looking into youth crime in Oslo. The city (NYC) had managed to drastically reduce crime following the peak year of around 1990, but it still had crime figures that were well above those of Oslo. A decline in murders from nearly 3000 per year to 500 was undoubtedly very impressive, but still it was well above Norwegian levels (Norway has half the population and approximately 40 murders per year).

But when I started examining the numbers more closely I started to detect a very interesting pattern: Almost all the serious crime in New York occurred in the poor areas of Harlem, in parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn. The more affluent areas of Manhattan had been cleaned up, a picture which was confirmed by personal experience. In New York, I was repeatedly surrounded by gangs in the middle of the night who asked me what the time was. When I told them they would pat me on the shoulder and thank me. I never experienced that in Oslo.

Segregation

Eventually I realized that child muggings in wealthy areas were something of a unique Norwegian phenomenon. In New York, Los Angeles, Guatemala City and other places that I’m familiar with the mental distance between the slums and the wealthy districts are simply too great for poor gangsters to rob the posh boys. The child muggers in the western parts of Oslo were a paradoxical expression of the Norwegian equal society, where the posh King could be broken, and the poor knight could become the king wearing SNC and Napapijri jackets for the day.

Don’t get me wrong: if the youths on the west side are safer today than they were before that’s a good thing. But the mugging wave in the capital’s most vulnerable valley is a serious warning about what the city is facing in the near future. In the US crime trends have for a long time been largely intra-ethnic: Black people kill black people, whites kill whites and Hispanics kill each other. This is a symptom of a far more segregated society.

Groruddalen is not there yet, not even in the diverse valley’s most vulnerable areas. Compared to other countries’ capital cities — even in our neighboring countries — Oslo is less segregated, but we are invariably moving in that direction. However this does not mean that the city is lost, it only means that it is starting to resemble cities in other countries.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too overly concerned about youths from the eastern parts of Oslo mugging their peers in Majorstua. Perhaps we should be more worried when they start mugging each other.

See last month’s GoV post for information on Aslak Nore.

For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.