Presentation on Invisible/visible violence for Action research workshops (original) (raw)
Related papers
(Updated) Basic guide to a 'deeper and longer' analysis of violence
The guide is part of a third phase of trans-disciplinary action research (bricolage) in the South African context although the findings are relatable to other unequal and transitional contexts. It consists of an analytical framework which is a groundtruthed and calibrated adaptation of Galtung's triad of cultural-structural-direct violence.
Violence and Society in Post-Apartheid Cape Town
High levels of crime and violence continue to plague South Africa after nearly two decades of peace and democratic rule. While collective violence continues to occur in the form of violent protests and community mob justice, the majority of violent incidents in South Africa are instances of individual, interpersonal violence. Theories of a ‘culture of violence’ in South African society and broader structural explanations do not elucidate reasons for individual-level variation in the perpetration of violence, glossing over the fact that the majority of South Africans do not perpetrate violence. Using survey and interview data from Cape Town, this thesis examines the risk factors that are associated with an increased likelihood of individuals, and particularly young men, committing different types of violent behavior: assault against strangers, assault against family members and intimate partners, and carrying weapons outside the home. Quantitative self-report data on the perpetration of violence come from the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), a longitudinal survey study of a panel of young people in Cape Town that has followed them through young adulthood. As CAPS contains questions on a wide range of socioeconomic, behavioral, and experiential variables, it allows me to test many hypotheses from the South African and international literature on risk factors for violent behavior. The survey data are complemented by evidence gathered through semi-structured interviews with African residents living in high-violence areas of Cape Town. The interviews provide perceptions and experiences of violence and its effects on the lives of those who are daily exposed to the risk of violence as potential victims, perpetrators, or witnesses. It is argued that this mixed methods approach provides a more complete picture of the variation in and dynamics of violence. A number of key categories of risk factors are found to be significant across the different categories of violent behavior perpetration. Exposure to violence and deviance in his own family in childhood and young adulthood increases the risk of a young man perpetrating violent behavior; it is argued that this is through a normalization of violence as a means of dispute resolution. This same process of normalization of violence can take place at the neighborhood level in socially disorganized areas, where young people find violent role models and easy access to illegal substances and weapons. Other measures of socioeconomic status, such as poverty or unemployment tend to have indirect effects on violence perpetration through their influence on neighborhood context or behavioral factors. Substance abuse produces violent interactions through altered behavior, and heavy alcohol use increases the likelihood of perpetrating assault. A culture of violent male control of intimate relationships and male sexual entitlement contributes greatly to intimate partner violence (IPV), buttressed by normative support for IPV among both women and men. Strategies for changing individual behavior and social norms in South Africa to reduce and prevent interpersonal violence are discussed, and the question of how to link individual-level and societal/cultural theories of violence in future work is also explored.
VIOLENCE IS NOT A CRIME: The impact of ‘acceptable’ violence on South African society
South African Crime Quarterly
In his book, A Country at War with Itself, Antony Altbeker has highlighted that the extraordinary and distressing feature of crime in South Africa is not how common it is, but how violent. This analysis moves on from that point, arguing that rather than focusing on violent crime as a specific type of criminality, we should examine violence as a separate category that sometimes overlaps with crime and sometimes does not. This shift in focus reveals that it is not South African crime that is so violent, but South African society in general. It shows that many of these forms of violence are both legal and socially acceptable. This includes violence in childrearing, intimate relationships, education, sport, film and television, establishing social identities, and political negotiation, to name but a few significant areas. An examination of these popular and accepted forms of violence provides a revealing analysis of how these patterns are reproduced socially and psychologically, explain...
Violence as a form of communication : making sense of violence in South Africa
African Journal on Conflict Resolution, 2013
This article explores the meaning of violence in South African society against the backdrop of its violent past. Using a perspective suggested by H.W. van de Merwe** and Sue Williams in an article in 1987 – understanding violence as a form of communication – the article seeks to analyse how the persistence and scale of violence can be understood as a legacy of our past. This approach can also help foster spaces for more constructive engagement with those who resort to violence in the face of the society’s failure to provide effective channels for more constructive communication.
Social and Health Sciences
Our analysis of the state of violence prevention in the country is based on a thematic content analysis of abstracts submitted for the First South African National Conference on Violence Prevention. A description of the constituent features of interventions, as well as the theoretical and evaluative assumptions that underlie them, is useful for identifying gaps, strengths and areas for development in the violence prevention sector. Our analysis suggests that the work presented at the conference, albeit a limited representation of violence prevention initiatives in the country, may be indicative of the plural forms of violence and is partially responsive to the complex psychosocial drivers of violence. While multidimensional interventions seem to focus on central contributing factors, including gendered cultural norms and practices, hegemonic masculinities, specific vulnerable groups and locations, the structural drivers of violence are not directly addressed. There is thus space and...
Symbolic violence: Enactments, articulations and resistances in research and beyond
African Safety Promotion, 2018
In his pioneering work on the subject, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (2001, p.1-2) defines symbolic violence as “a type of submission… a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims, exerted for the most part through purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition, recognition or even feeling....”. This Special Issue of African Safety Promotion: A Journal of Injury and Violence Prevention seeks to reflect on the multiple ways that symbolic violence is implicated in research; how research reproduces symbolic violence; and how hierarchies within research institutions determine the ‘legitimacy’ of specific knowledges and knowledge producers. We believe that a focus on symbolic violence is necessary to advance nuanced, complex and meaningful understandings of how different kinds of violence operate and are sustained in contemporary society.