Söt men farlig - kvinnor som förövare i medierna

Sammanfattning: Author: Charlotta Berg Title: Cute but dangerous – women as perpetrators in media Supervisor: Elizabeth Martinell Barfoed Assessor: Åsa Lundqvist, Katarina Jacobsson, Verner Denvall The objective of this paper was to, through a discourse analysis, examine in what way the Swedish media characterize women who have committed crimes of violence. By using a gender perspective my ambition was to find out how women’s violence is evaluated, what kind of explanations that are used, how texts bring together terms as “woman” and “perpetrator” and how stereotypes affect the way women’s violence is described. The method used is a qualitative discourse analysis, and the results have been achieved by studying newspaper articles. The results attained indicate that we seem to use existing stereotypes when we discuss women and their crimes of violence. Seemingly we refuse or avoid perceiving a woman as a perpetrator and often use terms of victimization when the phenomenon is brought to attention. Other methods to bring together the terms is to make the perpetrator harmless. Some texts, mostly concerning violence in heterosexual relationships, are debating this phenomenon without further explaining or scrutinizing it.