Hvordan kommuniseres vold og overgrep til barn på nettstedet Jeg vil vite?

Abstract

This master thesis will analyse and evaluate how the website «Jeg vil vite» communicates violence and sexual abuse to children. The publisher of «Jeg vil vite» is Stine Sofie’s Foundation, and I have limited my analyses to the website’s front page and three selected texts, which deals with the three types of violence: physical violence, psychological violence and sexual abuse. In order to answer the issue of the master thesis, I will make a textual analysis with a social semiotic approach. I will put a special emphasis on the three meta functions by M.A.K Halliday, to see how the verbal language and the visual elements make the texts meaningful. Further, I will use the rhetoric, external pentagram to examine how the five constants of the pentagram adapt to each other in the texts. Violence and sexual abuse towards children is a very under-communicated and taboo ridden thematic, where one of the most important target groups is the children, who need knowledge to report, whether it is themselves or someone they know who is exposed. «Jeg vil vite» definitely try to prevent violence and sexual abuse through information texts and tests which are adapted to children, who is the primary target group of «Jeg vil vite». The results from the analysis, show that Stine Sofie’s Foundation uses verbal and visual elements to communicate violence and abuse to the children. Through a childish tone in the verbal language, and through simple, abstract visual illustrations, these elements are well adapted to the receivers. The visual elements appear to be used to specify or contrast the verbal language. Further, this evaluation will show that the five constants in the pentagram don’t match, which can result in a veiled and biased illustration of violence and sexual abuse towards children. This biased illustration is by a large degree due to Stine Sofie’s Foundation’s use of gender specific words and illustrations in certain parts of the text, which seems to make the communication not applying to all the children. The website also lacks a defined age group and a specific purpose, which can result in the weakening of the communication of violence and sexual abuse toward children, since it doesn’t clearly emerge how the children shall find the website, how they shall use it and also, which information is for children and which information is for adults, who are the secondary target group of the website. However, the results show that Stine Sofie’s Foundation also succeeds in communicating violence and sexual abuse to children through a childish and simple tone, which sometimes create a closeness between them and the children. Stine Sofie’s Foundation has a lot of knowledge on the thematics, which implies that they have a strong ethos and a clear knowledge on how to communicate it to children