ABSTRACT
On 1 July 2018, a new consent-based legislation entered in force in Sweden, making it illegal to perform sexual intercourse with a person who was not participating voluntarily. The main argument in this chapter is that in Sweden, this legal shift was the result of a discursive process that since the mid-1990s, in particular, was taking place in news reports and debate about the legal handling of a number of hyper-medialised Swedish group rape cases. Through an analysis of newspaper articles, the aim is to highlight how a gradual change towards voluntariness was reflected in, and largely pushed by, news reports and debate about these cases. The chapter describes how the terms ‘consent’ and ‘negligence’ were gradually introduced, heavily debated and slowly implemented in the legal discourse over a period of more than twenty years. Theoretically, it is shown how the legal shift from a force-based legislation to a consent based-construction was the result of an ongoing interplay between challenging articulations on the discursive field and attempts to fixate the meaning of terms on the legal discourse.
