Verkligheten i sagoform? : En kvalitativ studie om hur sexuella övergrepp mot barn framställs i barnböcker

Within society, sexual abuse is a subject of taboo and has a number of stigmas attached to it which can make it difficult for children to talk about it let alone make a disclosure as typically can be a relative or someone that the child trusts. The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of how sexual abuse against children is depicted in children’s literature. Within our study we have examined how sexual abuse is portrayed by the authors, we have also looked at the characters and emotions that are described and expressed in relation to sexual abuse. The study that we have carried out is providing pivotal information for social workers who are working with children who have been a victim of sexual abuse. Our study highlights the importance of children's books as a source of understandable information for the children around sexual abuse. The study is based on eight children's books that informs about sexual abuse in a number of different ways. We decided to focus our study on children's books whose target audience is children from the ages 3-12. We have decided to focus on this age group as sexual abuse against children over 12 carry a number of different implications and the perpetrators are dissimilar. By doing a text analysis of the books with the theoretical concepts norm and deviance we found that children books show sexual abuse in a slightly different way than how it is in reality. This is probably a way to try to create a change in the way children see the phenomenon. Even though the sexual abuse itself is described as a deviance in all of the books we found that instead of depicting the reality which for example is that children do not dare to talk to a grown ups about the sexual abuse, the majority of the children in the literature goes directly to their parents to tell them about the abuse. Another example is that common feelings in reality like shame and guilt is not mentioned in more than two of the books. In other words: children’s literature teach children how grown ups would like for them to act and feel when they have gotten sexually abused