Elder Abuse as Constructed by Dagens Nyheter: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

Abstract: In order to analyze how the concept of elder abuse was constructed within the narrative of a newspaper article series, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) was applied to 175 newspaper articles following the Carema Care elder abuse case. The articles used for the study were published by DN.se, the online version of the Swedish morning newspaper Dagens Nyheter, between 2011-10-11 and 2012-10-11. Throughout the entirety of the article series, the concept of elder abuse was consistently found to be constructed as something shocking and unacceptable. The FDA furthermore revealed how five different discourses - science and medicine, power relationships, economy, morals and ethics and finally the discourse of responsibility - constituted almost all of the synergistic discursive concept combinations that formed the discursive construct of elder abuse within the article series. These five discourses were therefore further analyzed for action orientations, positionings, practices and subjectivity in order to open up the discursive worlds inhabited by the participants of the narrative and to show how the particular subject matter construct was constituted and presented to the recipients of the narrative. Finally, a discussion of the analysis focused on the processes of depersonalization and dehumanization with particular regard to the Foucauldian concept of exclusiveness. The article-constituted passive voicelessness of the victims of elder abuse was given special attention, since being constructed as a non-active subject, as a thing rather than as a human being, has been shown to be an enabling factor in abuse cases.