'We don't kidnap children': Why Sweden is worried about a new conspiracy theory

Swedish authorities are warning against an ongoing global disinformation campaign which claims that social services routinely 'kidnap' Muslim children in an attempt to secularise them. But what's the context behind this story, and why has it gained such traction?

Thelocal Rapporterar kring uppgifter om att Sverige inte skulle kidnappa barn ifrån föräldrar. Zeinab som är en av de som startade upproret framhåller i en intervju med "Dagens Nyheter" att kidnappningarna inte bara rör muslimska barn utan detta drabbar alla, vilket är en åsikt som delas av SHGR, i våra undersökningar.

Just before the turn of the year, Zeinab Ltaif, a mother-of-six, slammed the Swedish social services in an interview with YouTube channel Shuounislamiya, which is followed by more than 600,000 people.

In the interview, Ltaif discussed ten families in Sweden who, she believes, had their children wrongly taken into care. Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan reports that one of these cases centred on a 13-year-old girl who Ltaif claimed was "kidnapped" and forced to remove her headscarf after she "jokingly" wrote to her teacher that she was abused at home.

The girl on the other hand told the court that she had been hit by her parents on multiple occasions and that she had wanted to remove her headscarf after living under pressure from her family to wear it, according to court documents seen by the newspaper.

The interview became the starting point of a scattered but global campaign which has united several actors and made headlines in Sweden and beyond in recent weeks. When social media accounts with links to violent Islamist organisations got involved, it prompted Swedish authorities to warn of disinformation, violent threats made against the social services, and a possible risk of terror attacks in their wake.

Swedish investigative news site Doku was first to report on the wave of disinformation. Some of the conspiracy stories claim that there is an ongoing systematic assimilation programme of Muslims in Sweden, and some publish the names of individual social service workers.

“These stories are using words which in Arabic – or in the Muslim culture – are extremely sensitive: kidnapping of children, being placed with paedophiles, forced to eat pork, and even that they are being subject to sexual abuse,” Magnus Ranstorp, counterterrorism and violent extremism researcher at the Swedish Defence University, told The Local.

Ltaif, whose organisation “Mina rättigheter” (“My Rights”) Ranstorp described as a “magnet” for many of these stories, on Saturday organised a protest in the city of Malmö against the work of the social services, the latest in a series of protests which have also been held in Gothenburg and Stockholm. Ltaif has however, tried to distance her campaign from the extreme conspiracy theories.

The Local could not reach Ltaif for comment, but she told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in mid-February: “We’re fighting to put a stop to the spread of this disinformation. It’s important to point out that this isn’t just about Muslim children. There are Swedish children, Christian children and non-religious children. We don’t want to Islamise the issue, this is about all children.

“There are lots of people trying to exploit this issue to their advantage. It’s disappointing.”