How a TikTok video by Finnish police is representing the victim : A Multimodal critical discourse analysis on victim blaming in Tiktok video

Abstract: The Finnish police have power and influence as they are gate keepers of the criminal justice system. Governmental crime reduction policies rely on the actions of the police and in 2020 the Finnish police made a TikTok video to warn adolescences about dangers of sexting. My thesis uses Lerner’s Just world hypothesis and Bacchi’s What’s the problem represented to be as a theoretical framework, and multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to identify how the victim is represented in the TikTok video. The analysis on the content of the TikTok video is representing the victim as culpable for the crime against him/her. When the analysis is applied to the theoretical framework, it can be argued that the instructive TikTok video bears pressing social and institutional problems and extends people’s responsibility for avoiding crime and therefore fails achieving a balanced policy between crime prevention and criminal justice response.