Sex sells - does child sexual abuse? : A quantitative study examining the history ofevocative language use in Swedish newspapersregarding child sexual abuse

Abstract: The aim of this master’s thesis is to examine and analyze the news valuetheory and framing of news regarding child sexual abuse. The researchquestions for this study were:What changes can be found in the use of evocative language in crimejournalism regarding cases of sexual abuse towards children?Are there any clear differences in the language used when investigating theperspectives of objective, sensational and local journalism?The study has been conducted via a quantitative analysis, analyzing 1460articles, from three different newspapers archives. From 1994 up until 2020.The newspapers in the analysis are three Swedish newspapers, Aftonbladet,Dagens Nyheter and Barometern. To arrive at my conclusion, I measured thefrequency of a selected group of evocative words, measuring across the threenewspapers how often the words occurred as well as during what timeperiods.Through the analysis I found that Swedish newspapers, no matter theirdirection towards sensationalism, kept a neutral and objective tone regardingchild sexual abuse in most cases. With not so many cases of purely evocativewords.