Our society has a common understanding of the negative consequences caused to children

by alcohol abuse and is an issue that has been ambitiously raised for the last few centuries

in Swedish society. This thesis observes how a modern Swedish non-profit organisation

conveys the unsafety caused by alcohol abusing adults among children through their

advertisements and how they visually represents children through a semiotic visual

analysis on four advertisements found in the Swedish daily press. The analysis led to a

result in which neither signs of alcohol abuse, the perpetrator or the children’s homes in

which alcohol abuse usually occurs were physically present in the images. The only

possible explanation to why the children were interpreted as a victim in the images was

due to the semiotic anchorage which gives full context to the image. Through the lenses of

criminology and victimology there has been an observation that the advertisements

reinforces stereotypical patterns of children as the victim being innocent-looking, very

young and in need of protection. This puts them higher in the hierarchy of victimisation in

which introduces risks of hiding other potential victims. The thesis concludes that the

advertisements efficiently raises awareness of the consequences of alcohol abuse with

rational messages. The advertisements unmistakably reflects a reality that many children

go through but could benefit from being more diverse in their choice of motives and thus

making more victims feel seen and represented.