Robert Morrell

Empowering teenagers to prevent pregnancy: lessons from South Africa

Reducing rates of teenage pregnancy is an important part of the agenda of action for meeting most of the Millenium Development Goals. South Africa has important lessons for other countries in this regard as the rate of teenage pregnancy is high but has declined very substantially over the last twenty years. The country experiences waves of moral panic about teenage pregnancy, with assertions that current problems are rooted in accepting or even encouraging the sexual appetites of young people rather than sternly disciplining them. In this paper, we argue that the key to success in teenage pregnancy reduction has been an empowering social policy agenda that has sought to work with young people, making them aware of their rights and the risks of sexual intercourse. Furthermore, family responses and education policy have greatly reduced the potential negative impact of teenage pregnancy on the lives of teenage girls. There is tremendous scope for further progress in reducing teenage pregnancy and we argue that this lies in paying more attention to issues of gender and sexuality, including the terms and conditions under which teenagers have sex. There needs to be critical reflection and engagement with men and boys on issues of masculinity, including their role in child rearing, as well as examination within families of their engagement with supporting pregnancy prevention and responses to pregnancies.

Counting Fathers in South Africa: Issues of Definition, Methodology and Policy

Abstract Current national data-bases in South Africa do not reveal the number or profile of fathers in the country. It is only possible to derive an estimate of fathers by making a series of inferences from other information contained in these data sets. In this paper, we argue that it is important for national surveys to directly identify which men are fathers. Internationally, research shows that engaged forms of fatherhood benefit children, fathers themselves and domestic relationships. In South Africa, research on fathers is limited. A major explanation for this is that, until recently, the interests of children were considered inseparable from those of the mother. The context of childcare in South Africa is changing. The legal framework is paying more attention to the rights of fathers and the numerous parental AIDS deaths are confronting fathers with more care-giving responsibility than ever before. Fathers are a potential resource to children but this is currently under-appreciated and not properly tapped. A start to remedying this situation is for national surveys to gather information on fathers.

Talking about rape: South African men's responses to questions about rape

abstract This focus is based on a series of cognitive interviews conducted as part of a broader quantitative study on rape in South Africa. During the process of refining the questionnaire, 20 men from the countrys Eastern Cape province, aged between 18 and 49 years, were asked to comment on questions about attitudes towards and practices of non-consensual sex with women. The men were divided in their views but most expressed fairly traditional rape-supportive attitudes. None of the men expressed discomfort with the attitude questions because they did not feel challenged by these ideas. In contrast, the questions about practices, which asked about very specific behaviours, caused conspicuous discomfort. This was largely because they provided a context in which men were confronted with their involvement in non-consensual sexual acts. This focus explores how these men responded to the questions and argues that, despite such discomfort, men are able to speak honestly about rape where anonymity is guaranteed. In the context of working with men to limit violence against women, if conducted appropriately, the process of research can serve to counter discourses that currently legitimate rape and include men in processes of gender transformation.

Gender and Education in Developing Contexts: Postcolonial Reflections on Africa

Two of the most pressing educational concerns in sub-Saharan Africa – violence and HIV/AIDS – are directly related to the ways in which gender is socially constructed. In developing contexts gender has stubbornly remained a one-sided topic with the focus fi rmly (and justifi ably) on the plight of girls in schools. In the African context where girls have often been marginalized, the benefi ts of education including increased economic opportunities, smaller families and its role as a “social vaccine” against HIV are well documented. Yet, in many African countries, access to education is curtailed by lack of resources and the question of quality of education has been raised as an important reason why girls continually lack the skills and confi dence to make appropriate choices in environments that are plagued by unemployment, poverty, violence, confl ict and HIV/AIDS. Schools are not safe places for girls and most of the gender analyses focus on the ways in which sexual violence manifests in school sites hindering and harming the education of girls. The focus on boys on the other hand and the construction of masculinities as a gendered construct has been largely absent from the literature on gender and education in development discourse. Where the focus has been present the construction of violent masculinities has received attention (Morrell, 2001). In industrialized and developed economies, research on gender and education has focused on boys, with a great deal of attention being given to the crisis of masculinity and feminist gains at the expense of boys. In this writing, boys have been presented as gendered victims who need support. This is in contrast to writings about boys and men in Africa who have often been demonized and seen as potentially dangerous. Recently though, an approach in gender and education in sub-Saharan Africa trying to shed light on the construction of masculinities and their complex relationship to socially and materially impoverished contexts ravaged by HIV/AIDS is emerging. These analyses generally conclude that violent and hegemonic forms of masculinities within resource-poor contexts nurture unequal gender relations and it is usually boys and male teachers that use violence. Girls mainly suffer the consequences of violence in school. Similarly, most reports on HIV/AIDS focus on how girls are made vulnerable to the disease by a rampant heterosexual masculinity. Girls account for nearly 60% of HIV infections in sub-Saharan

The Growth of Gender Research in South Africa and Southern Theory

The late twentieth century saw a steep rise in published works on gender in South Africa. This article is based on a quantitative analysis of the production of gender research. The theoretical backdrop is current interest in Southern theory, theory produced to analyse and challenge existing global knowledge inequalities. As a domain of research, South African gender writings draw both on global feminist impulses as well as national and local ones. In this paper we identify the trajectory of gender research in South Africa and consider the genealogy of its feminist writing. We show how the focus of gender was sometimes divided on grounds of race, but often was united by opposition to patriarchy which took forms of activist scholarship. We focus on a number of themes to show how feminist scholarship developed out of engagements with questions of inequality, race, class and gender. While gender research featured powerful engagement with local, South African issues which serve to give this body of work its cohesion, it also manifested divisions that reflected the very inequalities being researched.

‘I’m not scared of the teacher — I can hold him — I can hold him with my bare hands’: Schoolboys, Male Teachers and Physical Violence at a Durban Secondary School in South Africa

Violence that occurs in schools is antithetical to the function of schools as places for educating children and young people in conditions of safety, tolerance and reverence for knowledge. Ever since the English public schooling system was described by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), the existence of robust, hierarchical and often violent relations between schoolboys has been acknowledged. In recent decades, violence between school students has become a central concern for studies of gender in schooling, with bullying, sexual harassment and physical violence linked in a number of studies to issues of masculinity and patriarchal privilege. However, an issue that has been less well-documented and that is still poorly understood is the phenomenon of violence between students and teachers. In this chapter, we draw on empirical research conducted in a secondary school in Durban, South Africa, to explore the ways in which masculinity is implicated in physical violence that occurs between schoolboys and their male teachers in the South African context.

Feminism and ‘the schooling scandal’

Taylor and Francis CBSE_A_421294.sgm 10.1080/01425690903211210 British Journal of Sociology of Education 0142-5692 (pri t)/1465-3346 (online) O ginal A tic e 2 09 & Francis 0002 09 RobertMor ell m rrell@ kz .a .za Feminism and ‘the schooling scandal’, by Christine Skelton and Becky Francis, London, Routledge, 2008, 192 pp., £75 (hardback), £22.99 (paperback), ISBN: 9780-415-45509-1 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-45510-7 (paperback)