Abstract
Despite being rated as some of the world’s most gender equal countries, Sweden and neighboring Nordic nations show high rates of intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW). As the news media contribute to the shaping of public attitudes, this article pursues a two-step discourse analysis of how IPVAW was represented in seven Swedish newspapers during 2018. Although an individualistic discourse on IPVAW was found to be most prevalent, articles where perpetrators were presented as non-Swedish more frequently contained a structural framing of IPVAW. This confirms previously noted tendencies toward individualization and othering of IPVAW in Sweden.
Highlights
One third of all women are estimated to be exposed to physical or sexual intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) during their lifetime (World HealthSyntax Warning: Mismatch between font type and embedded font fileViolence Against Women 27(10)Organization [WHO], 2019)
The present study aims to investigate how IPVAW was discursively represented in Swedish newspapers during 2018, with regard to the causes of the violence and whether the descriptions vary with the perceived national, ethnic, and/or cultural or religious background of the alleged perpetrators
While not providing an explanation for this Nordic Paradox (Gracia & Merlo, 2016), this study shows that the assumed link between gender inequality and IPVAW is not commonly emphasized in Swedish news articles, as an individualizing discourse on IPVAW was found here to be much more predominant than a more structural understanding of IPVAW, such as that associated with feminist and women’s shelter movements (e.g., SOU, 2004:121)
Summary
One third of all women are estimated to be exposed to physical or sexual intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) during their lifetime (World HealthSyntax Warning: Mismatch between font type and embedded font fileViolence Against Women 27(10)Organization [WHO], 2019). An EU-wide survey conducted in 2012 found that 28% of women in Sweden reported having experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights [FRA], 2014), and in 2018, 22 women were killed through intimate partner homicide (IPH; Brottsförebyggande rådet, 2019). This apparent contradiction, the so-called Nordic Paradox (Gracia & Merlo, 2016), of coexisting levels of high gender equality and high IPVAW rates, merits further investigation of IPVAW and of how the phenomenon is understood in Nordic countries
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