Institutional cover-ups and failures in sexual abuse cases

Institutional cover-ups and failures in sexual abuse cases are presented not as a single lapse but as a pattern in which vulnerable people struggle to be heard while influential adults and officials can delay, distort, or suppress scrutiny. As Jeanette Kihlberg follows cases involving Karl Lundström, Bengt Bergman, and Per-Ola Silfverberg, apparently separate failures begin to converge: allegations are not properly investigated, family members protect accused men, and a prosecutor destroys a file rather than let Jeanette examine it.

A pattern across separate cases

Jeanette’s growing suspicion begins with connections between the Bergman and Lundström families. Both Bengt Bergman and Karl Lundström abused their daughters and other children, while Birgitta Bergman and Annette Lundström protected their husbands by providing alibis or otherwise shielding them. The cases differ in one significant respect: Karl confessed to involvement in child sex trafficking, whereas Bengt denied the allegations. Jeanette sees the family resemblance as more than coincidence, particularly when she discovers that the families had used the same solicitor, Viggo Dürer, for years.

The overlap leads Jeanette to suspect that the cases belong to a wider network. She connects the families’ influence and wealth—Bengt’s work at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and Karl’s at Skanska—with badly handled legal proceedings and the possibility that some were intentionally mismanaged. Her conclusion remains an investigative hypothesis rather than a fully established account: the evidence seems to form a tangle, and she believes its strands converge in a cover-up. The recurring presence of people who are difficult to identify or account for sharpens the point. In Jeanette’s formulation, Victoria Bergman seems not to exist in official terms, just as a nameless child purchased online and discarded can be treated as though the child does not exist.

How investigations fail

The Per-Ola Silfverberg case shows how a child’s credibility can be made the center of a proceeding while the conditions that shaped her testimony receive little meaningful examination. In the Danish defence account, the allegations against Silfverberg are characterized as difficult to disprove because their times and locations are unspecified, and the case is said to rest fundamentally on the girl’s credibility. The defence also emphasizes that she could not complete her interviews, leaving her account to be presented through a video recording of a police interview.

That recording becomes another point of attack. The defence alleges that the interviewer asked leading questions and steered the girl toward particular answers. It further proposes that she had a reason to accuse Silfverberg: proving that he had caused her mental illness might enable her to leave her foster home and return to Sweden. These are arguments made on behalf of the defence, not neutral findings established by the narrative. Their importance lies in how the child’s circumstances and possible motive are used to undermine her account, while the surrounding investigation is already marked by omissions and weak follow-through.

When Jeanette reads the public file, with the injured party’s name concealed by thick black lines, she notices neglected avenues of inquiry, manipulation, and apparent failures by both police officers and prosecutors. She senses little willingness or ability to get to the bottom of the allegations against Silfverberg. The repeated lack of investigative energy is itself significant: failure appears less like one isolated mistake than a consistent exercise of the power not to investigate. The case leaves Jeanette feeling surrounded by sex offenders, and forces her to confront how violence and sexual abuse can recur in institutions that are supposed to examine them.

The concealment of evidence

Kenneth von Kwist’s handling of the old Silfverberg file turns institutional failure into active obstruction. He recognizes that Jeanette’s sense of justice makes her harder to silence through the methods he uses with more self-interested people. Instead, he decides to prevent her from gaining access to material he possesses, knowing that his planned action is criminal. He retrieves a thirteen-year-old file from his desk and feeds its papers into a shredder after reviewing the Danish defence arguments.

The act matters both for what it destroys and for what it reveals about the prosecutor’s priorities. The file concerns a case in which the girl’s testimony had been challenged and the investigation had already been treated as inadequate. Rather than allow Jeanette to assess that history, Kenneth removes the record from reach. His conduct is not merely another failure to pursue allegations: it is a deliberate effort to prevent scrutiny of how an earlier case was handled. The image of the papers becoming strips gives the novel a concrete counterpart to the broader erasure of victims and evidence.

The discovery of the old case also changes the meaning of Jeanette’s investigation. She is no longer looking only for a suspect or a direct link between present crimes. She is examining the record of previous institutions—what their officers asked, what they accepted, and what they left unexamined—and finds reasons to suspect that those records have been shaped by influential interests.

Vulnerability and institutional protection

The novel places these failures against the precarious position of children who lack secure family care or recognized status. The boy arriving in Europe has been coached with a fabricated background and carries a hidden telephone number intended for use after he escapes the camp. At the same time, he has been supplied with an empty mobile phone and a small amount of money, while the adults directing his journey have sent many children to different parts of Europe. His arrival makes visible a system in which children can be moved across borders while their true circumstances remain concealed.

That vulnerability continues in the Swedish investigation. Three days after a dead boy is discovered on Kungsholmen, no missing-child record readily matches him. Jeanette recognizes that hundreds or possibly thousands of undocumented children may be in Sweden. Contacts at churches and the Salvation Army cannot identify the boy, and a charity worker describes children who take food beneath Central Bridge before disappearing from contact. The obstacles are not evidence that no one cares; they show how easily a child can fall outside the records and relationships through which authorities ordinarily identify and protect people.

Jeanette’s remark that these children may have appeared rather than vanished reverses the usual investigative assumption. If institutions cannot establish that a child existed in the first place, the problem is not simply locating a missing person. The child’s legal and social invisibility has already weakened the possibility of recognition, protection, and accountability. This is the wider condition that makes the novel’s cases of abuse and exploitation so difficult to investigate: the people most in need of protection may be least legible to the systems charged with providing it.

Complicity, doubt, and the limits of procedure

The cases also show how institutional failure can be sustained by relationships surrounding the accused. Family members offer alibis or defend husbands; legal professionals appear in more than one family’s orbit; and a prosecutor with access to a consequential file chooses to destroy it. The pattern does not make every allegation or suspicion equally proven. Jeanette distinguishes between what is documented, what witnesses or letters suggest, and what she believes may connect the cases. That distinction matters because the same procedures that can protect the accused can also be manipulated to discredit a child, while weak investigations leave neither the truth nor a fair assessment securely established.

In a separate encounter, Jeanette tells Ulrika Wendin that the evidence against Karl Lundström is strong enough that a conviction is likely, and explains that Ulrika’s rape report from seven years earlier could be reopened. Ulrika does not want to begin the process again. Her response gives the institutional record a human consequence: the possibility of a legal remedy does not undo the burden of returning to an earlier report and reliving its demands. The scene does not present refusal as proof that an allegation was false or unimportant; it shows that procedural opportunity and a survivor’s willingness or capacity to use it are not the same thing.

Jeanette’s own position is also shaped by a workplace hierarchy that has questioned her authority. A male colleague opposed her promotion to detective superintendent and, with Kenneth’s unofficial backing, proposed another candidate. That professional hostility does not by itself establish why particular abuse cases were mishandled, but it helps explain the resistance Jeanette faces as she presses investigations forward. Across the novel, the institutional problem is therefore both procedural and relational: evidence can be discounted, access can be controlled, and people seeking accountability can be treated as obstacles. The accumulating cases make the cover-up legible as a system of repeated omissions and protections, not merely a single concealed crime.