Ideal victims and sex offenders in a real world : An analysis of four well known sex crimes in the Swedish national daily newspapers in the 2000s with a focus on gender, ethnicity and social background

We have chosen to analyze how four well known sex crimes were presented in the Swedish national daily newspapers in the 2000s. We chose this topic because sex crimes are considered one of the most terrible crimes. Sex crimes involve the media and upset the society. Our purpose was to analyze if we could identify stereotypes and prejudices about sex crimes in the press reports. The four sex crimes were: Rissne case in 2000, Tumba case in 2003, Hagamannen case in 2006 and the Stureplan case in 2007. We have read all the news stories from the Swedish national daily newspapers Svenska dagbladet and Expressen about our four cases. We analyzed a total of 40 articles, five articles from Svenska dagbladet and five articles from Expressen to each case. It was a strategic choice that resulted in ten articles per case from two national daily newspapers. We had three discourses in focus: gender, ethnicity and social background, when we analyzed the sex crimes. The method we used was a qualitative text analysis. Our purpose was to analyze how sex offenders and their victims were presented in the national Swedish daily newspapers. The main question was how gender, ethnicity and social background affect the presentation of the perpetrators and their victims. We have concluded that sex crimes are permeated by myths and that Helen Benedict´s eleven rape myths regarding the reporting about sex crimes in the United States several years ago are constantly reproduced in Swedish newspapers in the 2000s. These prejudices are a problem on an individual, national and global level