"En galning råkade finnas i staden" : En kvalitativ framinganalys av Aftonbladets gestaltning av gärningsmannen bakom skolattacken i Trollhättan

On October 22, 2015, a masked man entered the primary school Kronan in Trollhättan and stabbed three people to death with a knife and a sword. Shortly after the attack the perpetrator was shot to death by the police. The event received a great deal of spatial attention in Swedish media and has been called the worst school attack in Swedish history. The twenty-one-year-old perpetrator had grown up in Trollhättan and it is his origin that is of interest in this study. The aim of this study is to examine how a perpetrator of native origin is portrayed in a Swedish medium. Previous research, which shows that there is a difference between how a perpetrator of native origin is portrayed compared to a foreign one, is used as background. According to these studies media often focuses on the perpetrator’s ethnicity and descent if the person is of foreign origin. Through a qualitative framing analysis we examine how the perpetrator in Trollhättan is portrayed in Sweden’s largest news website, namely aftonbladet.se. We explore how the perpetrator's ethnicity and origin are expressed and which of the perpetrator's characteristics are focused on by Aftonbladet. Through framing analysis we also explore how the perpetrator is portrayed from an us-and-them perspective, and how ideas and concepts are personalized through him. The results of this study show that the male perpetrator who is of native origin in the case Trollhättan is portrayed as a lone maniac who committed an act of evil and that Aftonbladet focused on his personal circumstances, for example that he had issues socializing