Project description:

This story is about rape crimes committed in Helsinki. We reviewed all rape convictions of the Helsinki District Court for more than a year and a half. The story reveals the different types of rapes, locations, situations and lengths of verdicts, analyzing the results with psychologist. The verdicts paint a picture of men who rape a woman most often in their own or the victim’s apartment. Many also know their victims in advance.   

Impact reached:

It raises once again the question of lengths of verdicts, are they long enough, and how hard it is for a victim to report a sex crime. Not to speak about the process that follows – usually it’s word against word. The story reveals horrible, extreme cases as well as the fact, how often it’s an act of crime that happens in a relationship or with an ex-partner.

Techniques/technologies used:

Information requests, going through large amount of court files and crime statistics. We collected data from the courts files to an excel and visualized the data by coding. 

What was the hardest part of this project?

Most time-consuming part was going through the court files, understanding what has happened and picking all the information we needed for our excel. Many cases had lot of censored stuff, also many were just hard to read because of the graphic content. It’s a hard process for the journalist as well. In these kinds of sensitive topics, making statistics to touch you is important, to be able to do the justice for the topic. In this piece I’d say we were able to do that. 

What can others learn from this project?

Sex crime is not an easy topic to tackle, but should be repeated regularly, to make the problem visible. 

Project links:

dynamic.hs.fi/2020/hki-raiskaukset/