EDITORIAL • There is talk of dignity, but the reality is neglect and abuse. Swedish elderly care has become a monument to politicians’ betrayal, cynicism, and decay.

It is said that a society’s morality can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable: children, the sick – and the elderly, which this text will address. In Sweden in 2025, the situation is horrifying. Reports of neglect, abuse, and other crimes within elderly care have become so numerous that they are impossible to keep track of. Behind each case hides a person – a mother, a father, a life partner – who once supported this country but is now left in the hands of a system in moral and organizational decay.

This is not about isolated accidents or exceptions, but rather systematic failure. A care system that fails both in human and professional terms, where elderly people are abused, humiliated, robbed, and all too often subjected to serious sexual offenses – by the staff whose task is to protect and care for them.

Cheap labor and a broken value base

How did it come to this? The answer is uncomfortable for those in charge – for politicians and their close officials who have turned elderly care into a tool for regulating municipal finances and integration policies.

When the budget does not add up – partly due to exorbitant costs for supporting unemployed migrants – it is the safety of the elderly that is sacrificed first. Low staffing, stress, short care shifts, and low wages have made the profession a low-status stronghold.

Qualified and language-skilled staff are leaving. In their place come people who often lack education, language skills, work motivation, and all too often also basic morals and lawfulness.

People often speak of ‘values’ in care and welfare as a noun. But in reality, the concept has become an adjective for being grounded in one’s values – a thin veneer, surface, and facade. One can also perceive it as society’s values capsizing and running aground – the value base. In any case, the traditional meaning of values as respect for the dignity of human life has disappeared.

”Unacceptable” – then nothing

Every time a new scandal is uncovered, the responsible politicians and authorities make the same reflexive and obligatory statements: ‘Unacceptable’, ‘This cannot be allowed to happen’, ‘We will review the procedures’. Then nothing happens.

Until the next case is revealed – the next time an elderly person is found neglected, deprived, raped, or mistreated. Then the same lip service confession is repeated. And so on in a literal vicious circle.

The fact that IVO’s statistics show a significant increase in reports of a type where one should be one too many and trigger a national outcry and shame, seems to no longer evoke anything but bureaucratic indifference. Another variation of the boiled frog, something that, along with gang shootings, bombings, and humiliating robberies, we have become accustomed to as a phenomenon in the new Sweden that is part of everyday life and must be lived with. Meanwhile, municipalities continue to skimp on care and the state hides behind investigations and oversight reports that never lead to any real change but cost a significant number of millions of taxpayer money that would have been more needed in the actual care operations.

From welfare state to humiliation

The Sweden that once built the welfare state also built a moral idea: that no one should be left alone in need or old age. In the 1960s and 70s, nursing homes were often proud institutions – bright, well-staffed, with care in both architecture and treatment.

The same goes for home care. Then, the employees had plenty of time with their clients, could go shopping with them, cook, sit down for a cup of coffee, and talk for a while with a lonely elderly person, where they might have been the only human contact the person had during the day.

Today, the reality is a parody of a welfare system. In nursing homes, elderly people lie in dirty beds, are robbed of their belongings, left without food or supervision. In the most extreme cases, they are subjected to deliberate humiliation and sexual abuse.

Even when home care works, it is now quickly in and out, leaving a few fast food containers in the fridge and leaving just as quickly. Talking to the client is not even considered because they do not even speak the same language. And when it often does not work, it is the same neglect, the same theft, and the same abuse as in nursing homes.

It is hard to imagine a greater betrayal. Growing old in Sweden has become partially or completely losing one’s humanity in the care of the state and municipalities. It is like waiting for death in purgatory and the antechamber of hell. Instead, a special place in hell should be dedicated to the politicians and high officials who drive elderly care in the same spirit of banal evil that Hannah Arendt attributes to the henchmen of the Nazi German concentration camp operations.

Political priority – or moral decay?

When the Swedish people are asked about the most important policy areas, care and welfare always rank at the top. Yet, everything else is prioritized: aid, EU projects, military efforts abroad. Our tax money is scattered like confetti for purposes far from what people actually care about.

Why do we allow this to happen? Probably because we are continuously indoctrinated with propaganda that we are bad people if we say no to additional aid billions for the poor Africans, if we wish for peace in Ukraine instead of spending additional tax billions to continue letting the ‘meat grinder’ grind, if we want to look after our own elderly instead of spending a hundred billion a year to support people who in hundreds of thousands each year come here from the third world.

But it is not us who have the poorer morals and value base, it is our decision-makers. The Pharisees who signal their goodness on the international stage, the nomenclature of sham democrats driven by lust for power and see citizens as their subjects instead of themselves as the people’s servants. The equivalent of the former pastors who held us in the discipline of the true doctrine. Those who replaced the Small Catechism with a corridor of opinion.

We must shed the undeserved shame and guilt that has been imposed on us and dare to ask how a country that calls itself rich can accept that its elderly live under conditions that would have aroused disgust in any other context? How can we tolerate elderly care that cannot be afforded, staffed with, at best, incompetent personnel, and at worst, criminal ones? How can we subject the most vulnerable and defenseless people in society to this?

A new social contract for dignity

A paradigm shift is needed. Not more investigations, but action. Background checks must be mandatory throughout elderly care – not only when hiring but continuously. There must be a national guaranteed level of staffing and competence, where elderly care is no longer a municipal budget regulator but a protected core area.

Above all, we must restore respect for the elderly as individuals – people with names, history, pride, and the right to dignity. A country that does not care for its elderly does not deserve to be called civilized.

Those who have done their duty must demand their rights, and if, due to old age and frailty, they are no longer able to do so, it is up to you and me to step in as their guardians when the politicians and officials who should be doing so are grossly evading their responsibility.

Time for awakening

The debate can no longer speak of ‘challenges’ or even ‘irregularities’. The tone must be raised to accusations of systematic mismanagement and moral failure. Every politician who places other priorities ahead of the safety of the elderly must be held accountable. Every citizen who does not do so and silently accepts the unacceptable has their Hannah Arendt lesson to learn.

If Sweden is serious about its lofty words about human rights and solidarity, we must start with those who deserve it the most – those who built the country where subsequent generations reap the fruits of prosperity. A humanitarian superpower is built from the bottom up, not the other way around. Only then can we speak of a dignified society again.