Har könstillhörighet betydelse? En studie av tingsrättens påföljdsbedömning i misshandelsmål

Sammanfattning: This paper has examined whether men and women, charged with physical assault in 2019, have been treated equally by the Swedish district court in their sanction assessment. By doing a quantitative content analysis the content of judgements, handed down by the district courts of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, have been categorized and quantified. The information was categorized by the variables the nature of the crime, the defendant’s sex, the defendant’s age, the penalty and the defendant’s previous criminal record and encoded in an encoding scheme. This resulted in a systematic overview, which clarified similarities and differences in the verdicts. A thematic content analysis of the judgements handed down by the district court of Malmö, focusing on the court’s justifications for the verdicts, further provided answers to which factors, according to the district court, have formed the basis for the verdicts. These factors have, based on this paper, been the defendant’s previous criminal history, the defendant’s living conditions, such as substance abuse and alcohol problems and mental illness, and the physical act. The study has shown that there are some differences in the sanctions imposed on male and female defendants. The results have further shown that the reasons for the sanction decisions have varied depending on the sex of the defendant