Iceland, despite its feminist reputation, systematically fails rape victims, shielding perpetrators and disbelieving survivors
Widely praised as a global leader in gender equality, Iceland consistently tops rankings of the world’s most feminist countries. But an exposé by the Icelandic newspaper Heimildin reveals a grim shadow reality: the nation has long failed its women in confronting sexual violence.
Following a series of Icelandic rape cases over decades, journalist Ingibjörg Dögg Kjartansdóttir reveals a bleak pattern: while victims are scrutinised, disbelieved and dismissed, perpetrators are handled with conspicuous leniency. The story she reveals, culled from her analysis of court records, police reports and public discourse, is disturbing: one where a girl’s reputation can be more relevant than her trauma, and a man’s “spotless past” outweighs the brutality of his actions.
In 1972, a 15-year-old girl, repeatedly raped by a group of boys since she was 13, was the one placed under a moral microscope. Despite detailed accounts of her being stripped, violated and passed around like contraband, the court chose to dwell on her supposed promiscuity. The defendants argued that she “didn’t show much resistance.” The implication? That her trauma was ambiguous, possibly even self-inflicted. The men walked free with suspended sentences, the ruling stating that jail would do them, and society, little good. It was a decision that prioritised the reputations of boys over the violence inflicted on a girl.
As Heimildin reports, the idea of “reputation” as judicial currency lingers ominously through Iceland’s legal history. Before 1940, rape laws explicitly imposed harsher penalties only if the woman had a “good reputation.” Even after the law was supposedly reformed, cultural inertia clung on like a shadow. In a chilling echo decades later, a 36-year-old man who had confessed to raping two girls in Reykjavik avoided pre-trial detention. Why? He was deemed a “family man” with no prior offenses, and therefore, no presumed threat to society. His victims’ broken bodies and fear were not enough to outweigh his societal standing.
A government relatively silent on sexual violence until the 1980s only began to stir when the Women’s List, a feminist political party, forced the conversation into Parliament. Kjartansdóttir writes, “There had been little or no discussion of sexual violence in the Althingi (the Icelandic parliament), until the Women’s List took action in the Althingi and requested an investigation into the handling of rape cases in 1984.” But progress was glacial.
Astonishingly, between 1997 and 2001, out of 224 reported rape cases, only 11 resulted in convictions. One landmark civil suit saw a woman suing both her assailants and the state after police botched the investigation so badly that it was dropped. The men admitted to sex, acknowledged the woman’s fear and couldn’t recall asking her consent. However, their consistency in denying wrongdoing was considered somehow more credible than her trauma. The civil suit resulted in the men paying damages. But they faced no criminal punishment.
Even when digital evidence entered the scene, little changed. In 2014, a teenage girl accused five young men of gang-raping her, one even filming the act and playing it at school. The courts ruled in favour of the accused, citing the girl’s inconsistent testimony. Trauma’s known effects – disorientation, memory fragmentation – were treated not as symptoms of violence but as grounds for disbelief. The boys were acquitted. One of them is quoted in the article saying, “Now we can do what was done there.” He had learned a simple lesson: there would be no consequences.
Today, that lesson holds. In 2024, two women, strangers to each other, allege that they were drugged and raped in eerily similar circumstances, just two weeks apart. The cases appear connected, orchestrated by the same man. Both women endured hours of abuse, yet no suspects have been detained. The police cite due process. They avoid the term “threat to public safety.” Detention, they remind the public, is a serious deprivation of liberty. The irony is blistering.
Meanwhile, victims hide in their homes, fearful and hollowed out. Only a fraction report their assaults, fewer still see justice. Many carry shame so deeply ingrained that they believe the rape was, somehow, their fault. When the law fails them, so too do the institutions meant to protect them. They face not only their attackers but a justice system that treats them as unreliable narrators of their own pain.
The rhetoric from the state is defensive, procedural, Heimildin reports. “We are a country governed by the rule of law,” a former minister of justice tells the newspaper. But in practice, the law bends protectively around the accused while remaining rigid against the violated. A society that still permits girls to be defined by the whispers of their peers and the prejudices of their elders, “a girl who would be of benefit to everyone, both boys and adults”, is not merely unjust, it is dangerous.
Original article (“Stúlkan sem var sögð allra gagn”) by Ingibjörg Dögg Kjartansdóttir was first published in Icelandic in Heimildin on 2 May 2025.
It’s available here.
Heimildin is an Icelandic weekly newspaper known for investigative journalism.
Summary by TMH.
