There is an ideal picture of how women should be to fit within the framework of the female stereotype and the conceptions that exist about the ideal woman can be linked to the normative femininity. The women who are far from the normative femininity are deviating from the normal and among these are criminal women. The perpetrator, unlike the ideal woman, is considered to have a low morale and to be active, which is the opposite of desirable female attributes. Previous research in the field shows that media's portrayal of criminal women has been based on a stereotypical picture of women. 

The purpose of this study is to contribute to an increased understanding of and, if so, how the media's portrayal of criminal women has changed in relation to the development of feminism in recent years. To achieve the purpose, we have from a gender perspective performed a critical discourse analysis where we analyzed 74 articles from the newspapers Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet in 2020. Twelve of these articles have been analyzed in more depth. In the analysis, we were able to identify three themes based on Fairclough's three-dimensional model: intersectional patterns, criminal women as victims of circumstances and women who deviate from the female stereotype. The result that our analysis led to was that there was no radical change in the portrayal of criminal women in the news media and that the stereotypical portrayal remains.