Ett halvår av #hashtaggs : En studie om hur medvetenheten kring sexuella trakasserier har påverkats efter #Metoo-kampanjen

Sammanfattning: In this essay we have used a qualitative interview approach to study the #Metoo movement that took place during 2017. Our aim has been to examine if ordinary Swedish citizens may have changed their views of sexual harassment in the wake of #Metoo, and if #Metoo and gender has contributed to these changes.We have carried out 8 interviews, 4 of them with men and 4 of them with women, all aged 22-25 years old and not in any close relationships or with children. Using several theories on gender roles, power structures and sex-related crimes, we put our empirical material into a theoretical context, seeking to find if our chosen theories could provide deeper explanations to the stories of our respondents and the themes we had ourselves identified.We found that the theories we had picked correlated well with our empirical material, with one important exception. While our respondents described several aspects of gender roles, power structures and sex-related crimes, the men never expressed a desire to maintain and uphold the older relationships of power within society, and instead attributed those reasonings to belong to the older generation. This turned out to partially contradict the prediction we had found in the theories.Our conclusion with this study is that there is a renewed foundation present in the viewpoints of our interviewees towards further development of the Swedish society to provide a just and equal everyday life for both women and men, to continue changing traditional gender roles and distributions of power, and that #Metoo has played a central role in that reinforcement. While these processes have been ongoing for many decades, we feel that our study has shown that #Metoo has provided a renewed boost on the path to an equal Swedish society.