Bevisvärdering av muntliga utsagor i mål om grov kvinnofridskränkning - en narrativanalytisk undersökning av berättelser om bevisvärdering och kärleksrelationer utifrån idén om juridiken som en språklig praktik

Sammanfattning: Gross violation of a woman’s integrity is one of the most difficult crimes to prove. Most often, one person's word stand against another. In such cases, the court has to prove the credibility and reliability of the plaintiff's oral statement in order to assess if it, together with the other circumstances of the case, can prove the case beyond reasonable doubt. Due to the principle of free evaluation of evidence, it is not laid down in Swedish law how this evaluation should be done. The Supreme Court has however created a method for how it could be done, in a number of cases. This essay aims to explore how the evaluation of oral statements regarding this type of crime is done, on the basis of an idea about law as a linguistic practice. By using a discourse analytical approach and a method of narrative analysis, the reasoning of the cases is viewed as stories. The focus of the investigation is to research what stories about evaluation of evidence that comes from the reasoning and how the romantic relationship between the parties is portrayed. The purpose of the latter is to investigate if there is a connection between the understanding of the relationship between the parties and the understanding of the plaintiff. The essay concludes that the lower courts most often follow the case law of the Supreme Court. At the same time, the lower courts show an inconsistency in their description of how the evaluation of evidence happened. Furthermore is the evaluation of credibility and reliability of the plaintiff's statement to some degree influenced by the courts' behavior of the injured party. This, in turn is evaluated on basis of what the court find is reasonable for the specific contextual situation of the plaintiff. The behavior of the accused party is not problematized in the same way. Depending on whether the court applies a gender perspective or not, the romantic relationship between the parties, and the plaintiff herself is portrayed in different ways. The author senses a tendency where the court on the basis of archetypal stories creates binary oppositions that are not allowed to coexist. In this way sense and sensibility, reason and intuition, objectivity and subjectivity are separated.