The purpose of this study was to do a literary content analysis to determine whether women as crime victims are being impugned by the media, and to find out whether the media in any way change the description of the crime from the way the police describe the crime. The method used was a qualitative analysis of nine articles written by the police about nine specific crimes, involving murder, rape and abuse, and then an identical qualitative analysis of fifteen evening newspaper-articles about the same nine crimes. The analysis includes questions about how the woman (crime-victim) was described, how the crime was described and what the focus in the text was.
The result shows that there is a difference between how the police write about women as crime-victims and how the media writes about the same crimes. It was however difficult to specify in what way, since different articles differ in various ways. The analysis showed that very little is written about these crimes in general, which adds to the difficulty. One aspect could be that the police and the media depend on different sources when reporting about crimes.