It is completely understandable to want a tougher crackdown on criminals after two suspected acts of insanity like the ones we saw this Christmas.
But we should also wish for functioning mental health care.
A care that ensures that those who kill can get help before they commit an irreversible crime.
A young woman is going home from the pub.
She is going to her childhood home where she sleeps over Christmas. She probably knows the way well, the one from the pendulum to the chain house. It is certainly familiar both in snow and summer, dark winter evening as early spring morning.
But this night she won’t come home. Her headphones remain on the asphalt in the morning along with a cable tie and a hammer. The appeal of family and friends for help in finding the 25-year-old woman is spreading in social media.
The hope that she is still alive, maybe just passed out on some couch with a little headache and anxiety, is finally suffocated when a person is arrested for murdering her.
The young woman who was home to celebrate Christmas is dead.
Very little is known yet. But from what has emerged so far, the 25-year-old woman in Rönninge seems to have been assaulted, abducted and murdered by a person she did not know. 26-year-old Vilma Andersson, formerly Robin, is now suspected of the murder. A person who, according to previous convictions, seems to have nurtured both rape and kidnapping fantasies.
Something similar seems to be the case in Boden. There, a 55-year-old woman was murdered and two more were injured – according to the suspicions, by a person unknown to them who had been mentally ill for a long time.
When these kinds of murders happen, they often get a lot of attention for completely understandable reasons.
It is many people’s worst nightmare; to be on your way home alone in the dark, no matter how familiar the street you walk on, and to be attacked by an unknown madman. How can you protect yourself or those you love against such a thing?
The most common culprit when a woman is killed it is usually a partner or a former partner. Being assaulted on a jogging track, like Ida in Uppland’s Väsby, or like Nimo who was murdered a year ago on the way home from work, is unusual.
Until it happens.
The police investigations into the young woman in Rönninge and the woman in Boden are far from complete. We in the media, and many who consume the media, are often very interested in the motive – the reasons why one kills. It is human to seek answers to that, to make the incomprehensible more comprehensible. To try to find some meaning in the fact that a family in Rönninge is now allowed to bury a woman who should have had many years left to live.
In cases like these, however, the motive is usually just sad. Maybe downright banal.
Sometimes it is a sexual motive, as in the murder of the young Lisa Holm.
Often it is about a person with a mental illness that relatives have raised the alarm about for years – like the 22-year-old in Boden whose mother called 112 just the week before about her son.
She was relieved when he received compulsory care, she knew he could hurt someone. The knot in his stomach returned when he was discharged again the very next day.
Or like Vilma Andersson in Rönninge, a person who has previously been convicted of a similar crime and who, according to a previous sentence, has an antisocial history and a habit of reducing his criminal behavior. Posts are now being spread in social media about the crazy fact that the 26-year-old was at large despite the previous sentence.
According to Aftonbladet’s information, there is also frustration within the police.
“These are people who are extremely mentally ill but are denied care and have nowhere to be. So they are released into society and murder innocents,” says a police source.
When a so-called act of insanity happens, many are naturally afraid. Others feel anger that the responsibility is placed on the potential victims. “Don’t go out alone”. “Don’t wear headphones”.
It is, of course, not the victims, or those who might conceivably become one, who should limit their lives. As Minister of Justice Gunnar Strömmer now says, several changes to the law are on the way which will, for example, mean that repeat offenders cannot be released early and that it will be possible to lock up really dangerous criminals indefinitely in so-called security custody.
But it is not possible to punish mental illness.
Because it requires care.
Preferably long before the crime is committed. In cases where it is too late – at least after.
Otherwise, the risk of new acts of insanity is high.
