How we talk about rape matters: the construction of rape in the Swedish legal system

Sammanfattning: On the first of July 2018, the Swedish sexual crime act on rape was changed. One of the purposes with the new legislative amendment was to demonstrate that the boundary goes to whether participation in the sexual act has been voluntary or not (Prop 2017/18: 177), for a conviction. Pressure from feminist movements and allies has pushed different states to reform their laws to prevent and punish violence against women. Additionally, the notion of consent and participate voluntarily has been one of the highly debated topics in Sweden after the #MeToo movement in 2017. This study aims to examine the possibility of legislation to change dominant legal discourses and understandings of rape. Further, the aim is to explore how courts handle rape discursively, how the law impacts the legal discourse, and how that discourse might impact and be impacted by the general understanding of rape. The investigation was carried out by collecting 36 rape convictions from Swedish district courts, using three periods (2010, 2017, 2019). By using Fairclough’s three-dimension model for critical discourse analysis, patterns within each year, and between the years where shown. By examining the discourses, I wish to give insight into how the dominant discourse in court construct rape and consent. The study concludes that certain discourses within the legal discourse have changed, but the dominant discourse of how rape is constructed has not changed due to the change in the legal framework.