The devaluation of victims in the “world of men”

The devaluation of victims in the “world of men” is Sofia Zetterlund’s explanation of how presumed perpetrators can receive more protection and credibility than presumed victims. The idea links an intimate moment at Johan’s hospital bedside to the broader pattern of abuse, family loyalty, and possible institutional cover-up that Jeanette Kihlberg and Sofia see taking shape around their cases. Its central contrast is stark: people may be cared for as equals in a hospital room while remaining radically unequal in the world that determines whose suffering counts.

The hierarchy Sofia describes

Sofia frames the imbalance as a hierarchy in which a victim can be considered worth less than the alleged abuser. In her account, institutions and communities are more inclined to protect presumed perpetrators than presumed victims. The formulation shifts attention from the individual act of abuse to the response that follows it: disbelief, protection of the accused, and the victim’s diminished standing are part of the harm, not merely obstacles to correcting it.

Her language is deliberately collective. She says she hates men as a group, then clarifies that this is a general judgment rather than a response directed at Jeanette personally. The conversation gives the concept an emotional source, but Sofia’s claim is not confined to private resentment; the surrounding cases supply the pattern she believes it names.

Johan and Karl in the same ward

Jeanette observes that Johan and Karl Lundström are only two corridors apart, lying in similar beds and receiving the same devotion from hospital staff. For a moment, their equal care seems to affirm that life has equal value regardless of who someone is. Sofia’s response exposes the limit of that equality: bedside care does not erase the unequal treatment victims and presumed perpetrators may encounter beyond the ward.

The contrast also unsettles Jeanette. Looking at Johan, she asks herself whether he is a victim, a possibility she has not dared to consider. She thinks of Karl, then rejects the connection as impossible and pushes the thought away. Her hesitation shows how the presumed respectability or apparent impossibility of an accusation can make a victim’s position difficult even to name. The scene does not establish what happened to Johan; it shows Jeanette confronting, and resisting, the possibility that he has been harmed.

Family protection and suspected cover-up

The concept broadens when Jeanette and her colleagues connect the histories of Karl Lundström and Bengt Bergman. Both are described as having abused their daughters and other children. Birgitta Bergman gave Bengt an alibi, while Annette Lundström repeatedly protected Karl, despite his admission of involvement in the child sex trade. The contrast between Karl’s confession and Bengt’s denial does not dissolve the pattern of protection around the families.

Jeanette sees the cases as threads that may converge in a larger cover-up. Bengt’s position at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and Karl’s success at Skanska give the suspected perpetrators money and social standing; the families also have reputations to shield. Jeanette points to legal cases handled badly and possibly mismanaged deliberately. The evidence presents this as a suspicion the investigators are assembling, not as a fully proven account of a coordinated conspiracy.

Who is allowed to count

The discussion reaches beyond the named families to people made socially invisible. Jeanette includes Victoria Bergman, whose existence is treated as erased, and an unnamed child who can be bought online, castrated, and abandoned in the bushes. The parallel is not that their circumstances are identical, but that both expose a system in which a person can be rendered negligible before anyone is held responsible for the harm.

The concept therefore joins failures of recognition to failures of protection. Johan’s possible victimhood is difficult for Jeanette to admit; families provide alibis or shield their own; and children without a secure identity can be treated as if their disappearance barely registers. Against the apparent equality of two hospital patients receiving care, the cases reveal a harsher measure of worth: whose account is believed, whose reputation is preserved, and whose suffering can be made to seem as though it does not exist.