Dagstidningars gestaltning av friande våldtäktsfall

The aim of this study was to compare what the newspapers chooses to present to the readers regarding exonerating rape cases in the year 2012 and in the year 2015. We wanted to investigate if the legislative change in the year 2013 have had an impact in the way newspapers describe exonerating rape cases. We decided to do a quantitative content analysis which implicated reading 75 Swedish news articles from each year with the aim to sort out how similarities, differences and common themes were framed. We were interested in what themes the newspapers chose to present regarding the victim and the perpetrator as well as what themes were not framed in the article. To analyze what we found in the articles we used the framing theory to distinguish imaginable explanations as to why the newspapers are framing exonerating rape cases in the manner which they are. By studying exonerating rape cases with the framing theory we found out that there is norms regarding exonerating rape cases. Some rape cases were described with information regarding the amount of perpetrators, alcohol and causes of the exonerating that could be classified as abnormal rapes. This is because the journalists point out what is not included in society's standard. There are norms within society regarding sex, gender and ethnicity which the newspapers chooses to present in various manners. We also found that the norms of each year are not that different from each other; our conclusion is that the norms within society were too strong to change within a three year period of time