In a marvellous example of crime and punishment meets you can’t make it up, we hear news from Sweden that a documentary team received a tip-off that a boy had been innocent of his conviction for rape. They were asked to investigate and the documentary was aired on Wednesday…but since then it has dominated the Swedish news headlines. Truth, it seems, really is stranger than fiction.

It all began last year when a 14-year-old girl was raped while at school by a 15-year-old classmate in the small village of Bjästa. Even after the boy admitted the rape and was convicted, many people in the town chose to believe his retraction of that confession and that the girl was a liar.

The documentary is shocking. Interviews with adults claiming that the girl is a liar and a slut, and that if she did not want to be raped she should just have “bit it off”. The village priest says that he feels so sorry for the boy because of everything he has to go through and then, grudgingly, is also sorry for the girl too (of course) but he still thinks the boy is strong and courageous for having to go through the rape accusations (not, of course, accusations, but a conviction). The school said they did not want to intervene too much because they wanted to remain neutral.

So what does this double-convicted rapist do? Puts in an official complaint about the television program.

News reports here and here as examples. The second tells us:

A 15-year-old boy convicted of two rapes in the village of Bjästa has reported SVT’s investigative programme Uppdrag Granskning to the broadcasting watchdog, claiming the show had made it too easy to identify him and had ruined his brother’s life.


The boy was joined by his family in filing the report with the Swedish Broadcasting Commission(Granskningsnämnden – SBC) following a heated national debate over an emotive case in the village of Bjästa, near Örnskjöldsvik in northern Sweden, media magazine Resumé reports in its online edition.


A girl raped by the 15-year-old was forced to leave the village and her school after many villagers took the boy’s side in a campaign that spilled over onto the internet. The boy later raped a second girl.


In his appeal to BSC, the boy writes that the programme made it too easy to identify him. His brother too has suffered as a consequence of the show, he writes, with a screenshot from his blog serving to reveal his identity.


As his brother’s blog included full adress, email and telephone details, the 15-year-old writes, it soon led to an avalanche of some 3,000 emails. A number of the e-mails directed death threats at the boy, his brother and his mother, the 15-year-old writes.

Doubtless he’s about to get a stack of compensation. It’s the way of the world now, isn’t it?

UPDATE: The full story is  now here.