Trovärdighet i rättssystemet : En studie om hur trovärdighet skapas genom identitetskonstruktion i ett våldtäktsfall

This study examines the construction of credibility in a rape conviction from 2013 in Swedish courts of law by the district court and the higher regional court. The study use discourse analysis with a focus on identity, and gender and honour as analytical concepts to analyse the concept of credibility. The results show that the concept of credibility is not constant throughout the courts and neither are the identities. In this case it may be due to the district court´s judgement in a general credibility and weighed in only the plaintiffs Romanian ethnicity and not the defendant’s Iranian ethnicity, while the higher regional court on the other hand judged a more specific credibility, looked at the facts and ruled out ethnicity. In the latter court the defendant was found guilty. The study also shows that when the courts interpret the parties from a modern context they miss alternative explanations for their behaviour regarding values of clannism in a pre-modern context. They missed alternative ways to interpret the parties as a trustworthy victim and a possible offender respectively. A result from this study is the suggestion that the most reliable credibility assessment is to interpret the parties from their own context