The debate about sexual offense : A critical discourse analysis of medias depiction of sexual offense

The purpose of this study was to analyze how the media constructs sexual offenses. This was concretized into two research questions focusing on examining representations of solutions to sexual offenses as well as representations of perpetrators and victims. The study has a scientifict heoretical starting point in social constructivism and furthermore the used method was critical discourse analysis. A choice was made to review debate articles from two of Sweden’s major evening newspapers; Aftonbladet and Expressen. The articles were analyzed with both a qualitative text analysis and a critical discourse analysis. The data was analyzed with the concepts of transitivity and modality. The results showed that several different solutions were presented in the articles, these formed discourses. The dominating discourses were: “More police officers”, “Stricter legislation”, “Valuation- and normchange”, “Deport foreigners”and “Society’s responsibility to change”. The result showed that sexual offenses sometimes are given less priority compared to homicide and gang-related crimes. The authors pointed out that this could lead to a greater need of police-officers. In some of the articles the authors thought that the legislation regarding sexual offenses was too vague, they wanted a more straight forwarddeportation and harsher punishments. Other articles focused on how sexual offenses are handled and how they become apparent is controlled by society’s norms and values. The authors arguedthat, for example, a patriarchal structure and bad male norms influence this, but also that the school has a responsibility to operate sex education. The result also showed that victims and perpetrators were portrayed differently in the discourses, with for example the use of “men’s violence against women” but also with a gender-neutral approach. In some of the articles neither the object nor the subject of the problem emerged.