Anna was out shopping in a suburb of Gothenburg a few years ago. She was in her 70s. A group of young men verbally abused her and one grabbed her by her genitals. Annika went for an interview at a school in the city. She encountered unprovoked verbal abuse from teenagers as she walked through the building.

If you have lived in Sweden for a while, you will probably have heard of at least one such incident of sexual assault or harassment against women. Heaven forbid, if you are a woman you may have experienced it yourself. In both the cases above, I know the women involved.

Despite its reputation as a nation that treats women well, Sweden is far from perfect when it comes to male violence and intimidation against women.

This week, more fuel was thrown on the fire of debate around the issue, when leading members of the parliamentary opposition claimed that Sweden had become a very dangerous place for women.

“Sweden is ranked as the second most dangerous country for female travellers,” tweeted Niklas Gillström, the chief press officer for the centre-right Moderate Party. “It is absolutely awful… [we must] make Sweden safe for women again!” demanded Tobias Billström, the party’s parliamentary group leader, citing the same data.

The next day, Elisabeth Svantesson, one of the party’s leading women, issued a new political poster, stating: “It has become unsafe to be a woman in Sweden.”

“It hurts me that the Sweden I grew up in and raised my children in, which was seen as the world’s best and safest country, is now known for fatal shootings, gang violence, and humiliation robberies. And [has become] a country where women worry about being outdoors in the evening, or are giving up on going out for runs in the woods,” Svantesson wrote in a Facebook post accompanying the poster.

It is great that political leaders are talking about violence against women – this is a burning issue. However, there seem to be two problems with the way in which the Moderates have approached it this week.

First, let’s look at the claim that Sweden is the second most dangerous country in the world for women. The research that the party cites for this claim is extremely dubious.

In its ranking of dangerous countries for women, it places Sweden second beneath South Africa and above El Salvador, Jamaica and Honduras. South Africa is a country where one in four men in previous surveys stated that they had raped someone, and half of these said they had raped more than one person.

The other three countries are first, fifth and second, respectively, on the list of nations with the highest murders per capita.

Does that sound like Sweden to you? No, it doesn’t. The research is from a blog published by a website devoted to reselling  antivirus, passport manager, and VPN software – and not to the complex issue of comparative sociology that is essential to making meaningful comparisons between the position of women in different societies.

The blog acknowledges that it is “extremely difficult to quantify something as complex as safety”, but then it plunges ahead anyway, making a forest of questionable assumptions.

It even notes that only 41 percent of countries regularly produce data on violence against women, begging the question: how can we make accurate statistical comparisons when there are no data for 6 out of 10 countries? The Local contacted the author of the research, but she did not respond.

The problem is that Sweden’s official statistics show it to have a very high number of rapes. But this is principally because of the way rape is defined and recorded here, which boosts the numbers significantly. A recent study by Sweden’s National Council on Crime Prevention (Brå), reported by The Local here, found that Sweden would come out somewhere in the middle of European rankings for rape if other definitions of the crime were used.

The second problem with the Moderates’ approach to violence against women, is that it comes close to a narrative pushed by the Alt-right supporters of Donald Trump and other authoritarian leaders – namely that Sweden has seen a rise in rapes because of increased immigration from Muslim countries.

Elisabeth Svantesson makes this connection explicit by mixing up the problems of “fatal shootings, gang violence and humiliation robberies” – which are problems strongly linked with non-European immigrants to Sweden, for reasons we cannot go into here – with women worrying about being outdoors in the evening.

It is true, as Svantesson says, that one in three women fear going out of their home in the evening, according to the latest research from Brå. My own straw poll of women in my extended Swedish family suggests that this might even be an underestimate.

But it would be a shame if the centre-right opposition stooped to repeating dodgy research and racist myths about Sweden in a bid to win votes at this autumn’s election. The issues at stake deserve a more serious and considered approach.

“Sweden is one of the safest countries for women, especially when you visit us,” Susanne Udvardi, who works for the Freezone (Freezonen), Sweden’s largest helpline for victims of male violence, told The Local. “The most dangerous place for women is in the home, it is the boyfriend or ex who commits the violence.”

David Crouch is the author of Almost Perfekt: How Sweden Works and What Can We Learn From It. He is a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University