Hon, orden och domen

Abstract

This study examines how female offenders are represented in Swedish district court judgments concerning possession of pepper spray classified as minor weapons offences under the Swedish Weapons Act (1996:67). The aim is to analyze how female offenders are constructed through the language of judicial reasoning and how notions of gender, responsibility and deviance are reproduced within court discourse. While the study is primarily situated within a sociological framework, its results may also be related to criminological contexts. The empirical material consists of guilty verdicts from Swedish district courts, analyzed through critical discourse analysis based on Fairclough's (2019) three dimensional model and Jäger's (2001) concept of the discursive plane. The analysis is further informed by the theories of hegemonic masculinity, social constructions of gender and accountability (Connell, 2008; West & Zimmerman, 1987). The findings show that female offenders are constructed as responsible and conscious actors through linguistic features characterized by high transitivity and modality. At the same time, the possession of pepper spray is frequently framed in relation to self-defense, insecurity and a perceived need for protection, creating a discursive tension between legal responsibility and social comprehensibility. Gender is rarely expressed explicitly in the judgments but emerges indirectly through descriptions associated with vulnerability and protection. The study also demonstrates that legal terminology with masculine connotations such as “gärningsman” (translated as perpetrator), reproduces normative assumptions within judicial language. Deviance primarily appears through the women's own accounts of ignorance, mistakes or distancing themselves from ownership of the object, rather than through explicitly deviant portrayals in the judgements themselves.