Women as perpetrators of violence are often portrayed as strong agents with an antisocial will to hurt others, write Satu Venäläinen. The focus of her new article is on the ways in which women’s violence is made meaningful in Finnish tabloids. The analysis attempts to dissect the ways in which the identities of “feminine women” and “violent women” are dialectically constructed.

The study concludes that the portrayals constructed in the data rely heavily on notions about Finnish society as equal, even to the point of being portrayed as a context that enables women to do violence and to get away with it.

Picture: Focus by keith ellwood, licence: CC BY 2.0