Det uppmärksammade barnomhändertagandet : En kvalitativ innehållsanalys av hur svenska medier framställer omhändertagande av barn

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to examine how newspapers construct the image of childcare in Sweden. To be more specific the aim was to explore and understand how media describes the work that social services are doing when they investigate the need of childcare or decide to emancipate a child from their parents. The questions this study wanted to answer is which perspective media most commonly choose to emphasize and if there were certain participants that was rendered as victims or perpetrators. To answer those questions this study used a qualitative content analysis applied on articles in six different Swedish newspapers. The theories applied on this study was social constructionism, priming and media logic. We found that Swedish newspaper, while discussing child protective services, more frequent described social services in a negative way. The material this study analyzed showed that children usually was pictured as victims while social services more commonly was the perpetrator. An interesting result was that even in articles where children was displayed as perpetrators, social services still was presented as ineffective. The conclusion of this study was that social services need a better way to communicate with the media to create a nuanced picture of child protection in Sweden.