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Getty ImagesSweden has dropped plans to imprison serious offenders as young as 13 due to a lack of parliamentary support.
The country is currently grappling with children being recruited into violent gangs, with more than 50 children aged under 15 appearing in court last year on murder or attempted murder charges, Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer said.
Sweden’s centre-right government will now draft legislation to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 14 from its current limit of 15.
“By lowering the age of criminal responsibility… fairer and proportionate sanctions can be imposed, and we will be able to create better conditions for rehabilitation than today,” Strommer said.
Currently, children under 15 who are convicted of violent crimes are sent to youth homes, which Strommer said led to more inmates later re-offending.
The government will now seek to lower the age of criminal responsibility by just one year instead of two ahead of legislative elections, due to take place in September.
Eight existing prisons have been tasked with preparing special sections for children, where they will be kept separate from adult inmates.
The aim of the measure was “to protect society from life-threatening crime, to protect victims of crime [who are] often themselves children”, Strommer told reporters.
However, Maria Frisk, secretary general of Swedish children’s rights organisation Bris, said the youth homes – known as SiS homes – needed to be strengthened.
“Nothing indicates that lowering the age to 14 will turn the situation around,” she said in a statement.
However, many SiS homes have also become recruiting bases for criminal networks in recent years.
The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Bra) reported a significant rise in homicides over the last 10 years, with 121 in 2023 compared to 87 a decade prior. However, this number decreased to 92 in 2024.
One of Sweden’s most violent criminal gangs, called Foxtrot, has often used teenagers for criminal errands, ranging from shooting at the door of a rival to detonating explosives or contract killings.
In 2023, the violence peaked when Foxtrot gang leader, Rawa Majid, entered into a deadly feud with a former friend named Ismail Abdo, who had become the leader of a rival gang called Rumba.
Abdo was arrested in Turkey in 2025, while Majid is believed to now be somewhere in the Middle East.
Several attacks involving suspects as young as 13 or 14 have targeted locations linked to Israel, including defence firm Elbit Systems in Gothenburg and the Israeli embassy in Stockholm.
Sweden’s security service Sapo has said the attacks could be linked to Iran, accusing the country of recruiting Swedish gang members to carry out attacks on Israeli or Jewish sites.
Iran’s foreign ministry has previously condemned the allegations as “unfounded and biased”, and said they were based on what it characterised as misinformation coming from Israel.
In 2025, both the US and UK sanctioned Swedish gang Foxtrot and its leader Majid, stating this was “due to their involvement in violence against Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe on behalf of the Iranian regime“.
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