Swedish man sentenced to prison for forcing partner into prostitution
A 61-year-old Swedish man has been sentenced to four years and five months in prison for forcing his partner into prostitution with hundreds of men. A further 28 men have been sentenced for offences related to the exploitation.
Swedish man sentenced to prison for forcing partner into prostitution
A 61-year-old man from Sweden has been sentenced to four years and five months in prison for serious procuring, attempted rape, two counts of assault and six counts of threats. The sentence was handed down on Tuesday by Argermania district court. The man is also ordered to pay 200,000 Swedish kronor – equivalent to approximately 18,348 euros – in damages to his partner as well as a further 310,000 kronor in fines for "illicit gains", reports El País.
According to the sentence, Tomas Runsten manipulated his partner into selling sexual services to between 250 and 276 men since 2023. Eleven cameras were installed in the residence and the man stored 19,635 sexual videos. The court found, however, that it could not be proven that any rapes had occurred, as there was insufficient evidence that he had forced her against her will.
Despite this, the district court established that Runsten had used various forms of control to get the victim to accept sexual assignments. Physical violence was one method, but also emotional dependence and dependence on drugs and alcohol. The court found evidence that Runsten himself caused this dependence by forcing the woman to consume these substances. Although the court accepted the control method, it required specific evidence for each individual rape case.
Runsten exceeded the boundaries that his partner had set, according to the sentence. The court found, however, that this "in itself cannot serve as grounds for interpreting that there was a lack of voluntariness when this has not been expressly shown", which was used as the reasoning for not convicting him of rape.
The other 28 convicted men received significantly lighter sentences. Two of them are to serve one month in prison, as the Swedish prison system has no minimum custodial sentence threshold for serving jail time. Another man was sentenced to supervised release. The remaining 25 were sentenced only to fines, in some cases from 21,000 kronor (1,927 euros) down to 2,000 kronor (184 euros).
The case is reminiscent of the Dominique Pelicot affair in France, where a man drugged his wife so that hundreds of men could rape her whilst she was unconscious. Whilst Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison, Runsten received less than five years.
In the Swedish case, it could not be proven that the man had drugged his partner without her consent, but it was proven that drugs were present during the sexual encounters. The court used this as an argument to explain why the woman had scarcely any memory of these occasions. The sentence states that Runsten "created and exploited" his partner's drug dependence in order to drive her into prostitution and profit from it.
One of the key pieces of evidence of forced prostitution came from a mobile telephone. When police seized Runsten's phone and examined the messages between him and his partner, they found evidence of the meetings. The man sent screenshots to the woman of chats with customers to inform her of who would have sex with her, when, exactly what they wanted and how much she should charge.
In the couple's conversations, Runsten asked his partner how aroused she felt before the men arrived. His defence claimed that everything was part of a "role play" in which he played a "humiliated, betrayed man".
The district court rejected this version, however. It noted that in May 2022, a year before the prostitution began, he sent messages to his partner in which he described his fantasies about seeing her have sex with other men, and that she never participated in this game. To further undermine the defence, the court found that everything was too concrete and operational to be fantasy: there were real customer names, dates, prices, addresses and specific instructions. It would not be meaningful, the court reasoned, to include real conversations with sex buyers in a shared fantasy scenario.
Source: Google News ES — Crime (es)