Down there in Swedish

When the court decides what “lady bits” mean.

About twenty five years ago, an employee at RFSU (the National Association for Sexual Information) was tired of there being no female counterpart for that casual, everyday Swedish word for the male sexual reproductive organ – snopp. In a stroke of linguistic genius, the word snippa was launched – a cute, casual, neutral, non-technical, easy-to-use word with no actual sexual connotation.

The words snopp and snippa are now part of the general vocabulary, and can be found in all dictionaries. Snopp and Snippa even have their own song. They’re particularly useful when working for and with children. A recent decision by the Swedish Court of Appeals, however, has drawn the definition of snippa into the spotlight.

What’s a snippa?

In June, 2021, a man was found guilty of raping a ten-year-old girl. He appealed the decision, and the Court of Appeals this week freed him on all charges. The reason was that the girl had not been clear enough when she said that the man had reached into her underwear and put his finger up in her snippa.

The court wasn’t sure what exactly that meant, and looked up the word snippa in the Swedish Academy’s Dictionary (SAOB). There it defines the word snippa as the external female genital organs – not the internal cervix or vagina. Ergo, there had been no penetration. Ergo, no rape. The man was freed. And now there’s an uproar.

The definition of a crime

Many find it alarming that the court needed to look up a word in the dictionary. Many find it equally alarming that a single dictionary entry was behind the definitive decision on a person’s guilt in a major crime.

Using the SOAB was the correct choice. It is the official Swedish dictionary. Had the court looked at the Swedish Academy’s List of Words (SAOL), which is a more colloquial dictionary, they would have found that snippa meant all the female reproductive organs and not just the externals. They could also have asked any grade school student, parent, or teacher what snippa meant. It is unclear why they didn’t simply pose more questions, particularly when the nature of the crime was so reprehensible and when there was no doubt that some crime had been perpetrated.

Further questions

It is also unclear why the prosecutor left out the lesser crime of sexual molestation of a child. If that charge been included, the court could not have freed the man from all charges. The prosecutor has explained that the court, in pre-trial consultations, strongly inferred that including the lesser charge was “a stretch” alternately “a bit steep” and that is why she left it out. No one really knows what went on here. It is both incomprehensible and possibly another sort of crime.

In a further twist, two of the lay judges that presided over the case have since resigned. This was met with approval by the district chair of the Social Democratic party. To be a lay judge in Sweden you must be nominated by a political party. Upon receiving a lay judgeship, you are supposed to lay your political leanings aside. For some, it is perhaps natural that a political party here takes an interest in the workings and results of the judicial branch. For others, it is a strange overreach.

The pressure is on for the case to be taken all the way to the Supreme Court. We’ll know in the next couple weeks if that is going to happen. Perhaps there we’ll find out the definition of a word that half of Sweden lives with every day, and that puts a man behind bars for abusing.