Marriage, kinship and childcare in the aftermath of AIDS: rethinking “orphanhood” in the South African lowveld (original) (raw)
Related papers
AIDS Care, 2009
There is widespread concern that the number of children living in ''child-headed households'' is rapidly increasing as a result of AIDS-related adult mortality in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Based on analyses of data from several representative national surveys over the period 2000Á2007, this paper examines the extent to which this is the case in South Africa. It explores trends in the number of children living in child-only households and characterises these children relative to children living in households with adults (mixed-generation households). The findings indicate that the proportion of child-only households is relatively small (0.47% in 2006) and does not appear to be increasing. In addition, the vast majority (92.1%) of children resident in child-only households have a living parent. The findings raise critical questions about the circumstances leading to the formation of child-only households and highlight that they cannot for the main part be ascribed to HIV orphaning. Nonetheless, the number of children living in this household form is not insignificant, and their circumstances, when compared with children in mixed-generation households, indicate a range of challenges, including greater economic vulnerability and inadequate service access. We argue that a solitary focus on the HIV epidemic and its related orphaning as the cause of child-only households masks other important issues for consideration in addressing their needs, and risks the development of inappropriate policies, programmes and interventions.
Care for AIDS orphans in southern Africa is frequently characterized as a "crisis", where kin-based networks of care are thought to be on the edge of collapse. Yet these care networks, though strained by AIDS, are still the primary mechanisms for orphan care, in large part because of the essential role grandmothers play in responding to the needs of orphans. Ongoing demographic shifts as a result of HIV/AIDS and an increasingly feminized labor market continue to disrupt and alter networks of care for orphans and vulnerable children. This paper examines the emergence of a small but growing number of male caregivers who are responding to the needs of the extended family. While these men are still few in number, the strength of gendered ideologies of female care means that this group of men is socially, if not statistically significant. Men continue to be considered caregivers of last resort, but their care will close a small but growing gap that threatens to undermine kin-based networks of care in Lesotho and across the region. The adaptation of gender roles reinforces the strength and resilience of kinship networks even when working against deeply entrenched ideas about gendered division of domestic labor.
The Open Public Health Journal
The increasing number of AIDS orphans has led to an increase in child and youth headed households. Adjusting to the parenting role with no support from their extended family is a source of distress for orphans heading households. This study explored the parenting experiences of orphaned youth heading households in resource constraints environments. Methods: The participants were purposely selected from Youth-Headed Households (YHHs) located in informal settlements in the City of Tshwane, South Africa. The data analysis was inductive and followed the thematic approach. Results: Thirteen females and five males aged between 15-24 years were interviewed. The phenomenon of YHHs occured in impoverished informal settlements partly due to orphans being forcefully removed from their parents’ homes after the death of their mothers. The household heads felt morally obliged to care for their siblings, experienced parenting as burdensome, and the role adjustment from being a child to a parent di...
Flexible kinship: caring for AIDS orphans in rural Lesotho
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2014
HIV/AIDS has devastated families in rural Lesotho, leaving many children orphaned. Families have adapted to the increase in the number of orphans and HIV-positive children in ways that provide children with the best possible care. Though local ideas about kinship and care are firmly rooted in patrilineal social organization, in practice, maternal caregivers, often grandmothers, are increasingly caring for orphaned children. Negotiations between affinal kin capitalize on flexible kinship practices in order to legitimate new patterns of care, which have shifted towards a model that often favours matrilocal practices of care in the context of idealized patrilineality.
The Drama of De-orphaning: Botswana's Old Orphans and the Rewriting of Kinship Relations
Botswana has the world's highest rate of orphans, primarily as a result of HIV and AIDS. National response policies include a range of material resources given to relatives caring for parentless children. The insertion of financial incentive into kinship obligations has transformed younger orphans into valuable assets, leading some relatives (at least allegedly) to compete for the " right " to house them, and causing moral ambivalence among the public. Yet as orphans reach legal adulthood, the cessation of social services and poor opportunities for wage labour alter relations with relatives in unexpected ways. In this article, I explore how the ranks of meaningful kin appear to both swell and shrink around youth ageing out of their " orphan " status. Based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Botswana between 2003 and 2013, these case studies expose significant labour expended among families in policing categories of personhood like greedy relatives, needy orphans, and economically stagnant youth. I show how kinship relations become affectively populated through moral discourses – and how these discourses in turn provide pathways for new forms of claims-making, even for the supplanting of " verifiable " kin by less " traditionally " legitimate forms of relatedness – ultimately reshaping the very practice of kinship in rural Botswana.
This chapter provides an overview of the phenomenon of child-headed households, with a primary focus on South and southern Africa, drawing on a range of literature. In addition, I make frequent reference to a large recent South African study conducted by Chiastolite Professional Services (2008), for which I served as principle investigator. In the first part of the chapter, I give particular attention to the context, definitions and prevalence of child-headed households. In the second part, I provide an overview of some of the main psychosocial concerns of these households, such as family role adjustments and sexual exploitation.