Shahnaaz Suffla

Violence and injuries in South Africa: prioritising an agenda for prevention

Violence and injuries are the second leading cause of death and lost disability-adjusted life years in South Africa. The overall injury death rate of 157.8 per 100,000 population is nearly twice the global average, and the rate of homicide of women by intimate partners is six times the global average. With a focus on homicide, and violence against women and children, we review the magnitude, contexts of occurrence, and patterns of violence, and refer to traffic-related and other unintentional injuries. The social dynamics that support violence are widespread poverty, unemployment, and income inequality; patriarchal notions of masculinity that valourise toughness, risk-taking, and defence of honour; exposure to abuse in childhood and weak parenting; access to firearms; widespread alcohol misuse; and weaknesses in the mechanisms of law enforcement. Although there have been advances in development of services for victims of violence, innovation from non-governmental organisations, and evidence from research, there has been a conspicuous absence of government stewardship and leadership. Successful prevention of violence and injury is contingent on identification by the government of violence as a strategic priority and development of an intersectoral plan based on empirically driven programmes and policies.

Community, intervention and provider support influences on implementation: reflections from a South African illustration of safety, peace and health promotion

BackgroundThe development, implementation and evaluation of community interventions are important for reducing child violence and injuries in low- to middle-income contexts, with successful implementation critical to effective intervention outcomes. The assessment of implementation processes is required to identify the factors that influence effective implementation. This article draws on a child safety, peace and health initiative to examine key factors that enabled or hindered its implementation, in a context characterised by limited resources.MethodsA case study approach was employed. The research team was made up of six researchers and intervention coordinators, who led the development and implementation of the Ukuphepha Child Study in South Africa, and who are also the authors of this article. The study used author observations, reflections and discussions of the factors perceived to influence the implementation of the intervention. The authors engaged in an in-depth and iterative dialogic process aimed at abstracting the experiences of the intervention, with a recursive cycle of reflection and dialogue. Data were analysed utilising inductive content analysis, and categorised using classification frameworks for understanding implementation.ResultsThe study highlights key factors that enabled or hindered implementation. These included the community context and concomitant community engagement processes; intervention compatibility and adaptability issues; community service provider perceptions of intervention relevance and expectations; and the intervention support system, characterised by training and mentorship support.ConclusionsThis evaluation illustrated the complexity of intervention implementation. The study approach sought to support intervention fidelity by fostering and maintaining community endorsement and support, a prerequisite for the unfolding implementation of the intervention.

A critical review of instruments assessing characteristics of community

Community development is critical in South African and other low- to middle-income contexts characterised by unemployment, violence, poverty and poor infrastructure. The current asset-based trend in community research emphasises constructive community development and change through the mobilisation of existing and unrecognised community resources and skills. Following this trend we critically examine the conceptual soundness and logic of asset-based community assessment instruments. We give particular attention to measures of social capital, social cohesion, community resilience, and sense of community. Our review reveals that while the asset-based approaches embody an important shift away from the deficits orientation, their associated instruments, which bring discursive impositions, are marked by conceptual and operational ambiguities, troubling assumptions about community and uneasy power dynamics in their implementation. We suggest that such challenges may be addressed through the employment of measures that draw on both quantitative and qualitative paradigms, and that assume participatory strategies to implementation.

Female homicidal strangulation in urban South Africa

BackgroundFemale strangulation in South Africa occurs in a context of pervasive and often extreme violence perpetrated against women, and therefore represents a major public health, social and human rights concern. South African studies that provide accurate descriptions of the occurrence of strangulation incidents among female homicide victims are limited. The current study describes the extent, distribution and patterns of homicidal strangulation of women in the four largest South African metropolitan centres, Tshwane/Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Ethekwini/Durban.MethodsThe study is a register-based cross sectional investigation of female homicidal strangulation, as reported in the National Injury Mortality Surveillance System for the four cities, for the period 2001 to 2005. Crude, unadjusted female strangulation rates for age and population group, and proportions of strangulation across specific circumstances of occurrence were compiled for each year and aggregated in some cases.ResultsThis study reports that female homicidal strangulation in urban South Africa ranges from 1.71/100 000 to 0.70/100 000. Rates have generally declined in all the cities, except Cape Town. The highest rates were reported in the over 60 and the 20 to 39 year old populations, and amongst women of mixed descent. Most strangulations occurred from the early morning hours and across typical working hours in Johannesburg and Durban, and to a lesser extent in Cape Town. Occurrences across Johannesburg, Durban and Pretoria were distributed across the days of the week; an exception was Cape Town, which reported the highest rates over the weekend. Cape Town also reported distinctly high blood alcohol content levels of strangulation victims. The seasonal variation in strangulation deaths suggested a pattern of occurrence generally spanning the period from end-winter to summer. Across cities, the predominant crime scene was linked to the domestic context, suggesting that perpetration was by an intimate partner or acquaintance.ConclusionThe study contributes to an emerging gendered homicide risk profile for a country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world. The results support the call for the development of evidence-based and gender-specific initiatives to especially address the forms of violence that instigate fatalities.

Photovoice as Community Engaged Research: The Interplay between Knowledge Creation and Agency in a South African Study on Safety Promotion

This article aims to describe Photovoice as a method and process of enacting community engaged research. The multi-dimensional nature of Photovoice is illustrated though a case application, focused on safety promotion in two South African low-income communities. Twenty youth, evenly distributed by gender and ranging in age from 13 to 15 years, were conveniently engaged as participants in the case application. In positioning ourselves as critical commentators, we employ the case application to illustrate the Photovoice process of engaging participants in observations and dialogue about their communities; creating a safe environment for critical reflection on current community realities; shifting participants towards action; and facilitating community change. Our critical reflections and descriptions of the processes and steps inherent to Photovoice highlight the value of a youth- and community-centred approach to research.

Towards the Development of a Responsive, Social Science-informed, Critical Public Health Framework on Male Interpersonal Violence

Emerging out of a larger study whose main focus was to identify the risk and protective factors in male interpersonal violence, and based on analysis of local and global empirical and theoretical literature, the main aim of this article is to develop a conceptual foundation for understanding and preventing male interpersonal violence in South Africa within the context of responsive local manifestation and dynamics of male violence. The conceptual foundation developed has been informed by both public health and social science perspectives. The impetus for the development of a conceptual foundation is not only the scale of the problem of violence in the country but, more importantly, the urgent need for a theoretically sound, locally-grounded and better-integrated understanding of male interpersonal violence and violence generally. The article describes violence in a global context before turning to violence in South Africa. Then it briefly looks at different theoretical approaches on violence before focusing on the public health approach to violence generally, and male interpersonal violence more specifically. Next it describes the ecological framework, given that this perspective tends to accompany the public health studies in violence. A critical appraisal of this approach is then offered. Finally, the article attempts to bring together these disparate perspectives in the process of developing a locally responsive, social science-informed critical public health conceptual framework on male interpersonal violence, drawing on and including a focus on the political, economic and social history of South Africa.

Psychological research and South Africa’s violence prevention responses

South Africa’s unprecedented levels of violence, which trigger significant health, economic, and social consequences, are marked by pronounced gendered, age-related, and socio-economic features. Extensive poverty, prolonged unemployment and income inequality, gender inequality, patriarchal notions of masculinity, exposure to abuse in childhood and compromised parenting, access to firearms, pervasive alcohol misuse, and fragilities in law enforcement are among the many factors inherent to the social dynamics of violence. We briefly describe some of psychology’s recent contributions to violence prevention research and interventions. The review, by no means a comprehensive one, is intended to encourage reflections and conversations about how psychology may increase its influence as a critical and intervention-oriented discipline alongside other disciplines, such as public health, social work, criminology, anthropology, development studies, social medicine, and urban studies. We suggest that as much as it is important for psychology to provide a relevant research response, it is equally important for psychology to undertake critical work on the responses to violence, including the intellectual traditions that underlie such responses.

Community conversations as community engagement: hosts’ reflections

This article reviews community conversations as a community engagement tool within the South African context by exploring the perceptions of the conversation hosts. A focus group discussion was held with community conversation hosts to better understand the community conversation process and its community engagement value. Their reflections are reviewed against four principles of community engagement, namely, appreciation, applicability, provocation, and collaboration. According to the hosts, the community conversations seemingly increased community members’ awareness of community resources and allowed for community members to voice their shared concerns and discuss matters that they deem to be most relevant in their community. The conversations were considered to have created a participative environment in which community members and external stakeholders could discuss potential solutions to identified problems, thereby laying a foundation for future action. Additionally, the conversations were interpreted as promotive of relationship-building and collaboration opportunities among community members and between community members and external stakeholders. The article reflects on limitations of the method and recommendations for its future application.

Community psychology and its (dis)contents, archival legacies and decolonisation

This article serves as the introduction to the Special Issue on Liberatory and Critical Voices in Decolonising Community Psychologies. The Special Issue was inspired by the Sixth International Conference on Community Psychology, held in South Africa in May 2016, and resonates with the call for the conscious decolonisation of knowledge creation. We argue that the decolonial turn in psychology has re-centred critical projects within the discipline, particularly in the Global South, and offered possibilities for their (re)articulation, expansion, and insertion into dominant and mimetic knowledge production. In the case of Africa, we suggest that the work of decolonising community psychologies will benefit from engagement with the continent’s multiple knowledge archives. Recognising community psychologies’ (dis)contents and the possibilities for its reconstruction, and appealing to a liberatory knowledge archive, the Issue includes a distinctive collection of articles that are diverse in conceptualisation, content, and style, yet evenly and singularly focused on the construction of insurgent knowledges and praxes. As representations of both production and resistance, the contributions in this issue provide the intellectual and political platforms for social, gender, and epistemic justice. We conclude that there are unexplored and exciting prospects for scholarly work on the psychologies embedded in the overlooked knowledge archives of the Global South. Such work would push the disciplinary boundaries of community psychologies; help produce historicised and situated conceptions of community, knowledge, and liberation; and offer distinctive contributions to the global bodies of knowledge concerned with the well-being of all of humanity.

Photovoice as Emancipatory Praxis: A Visual Methodology Toward Critical Consciousness and Social Action

Visual methods, eliciting the sensory and aesthetic dimensions of meaning-making, are inherent to participatory enactments of peace psychology. Visual methods recognize and contest the exclusionary influences of language-based modalities, and simultaneously imagine the research and associated development process as a participatory one. They create both conceptual and physical spaces for the marginalized in particular to challenge their exclusion and assert themselves as meaning-makers, knowledge-creators, and activists. This chapter draws attention to Photovoice as an illustrative visual method that has been adopted across diverse settings and social issues. The authors present a multi-country Photovoice project to enunciate how visual methods may be used successfully to support a participatory social justice approach to peacebuilding. The multi-country Photovoice project offered a method enabling youth to assert voice, engage in critical dialogues, raise consciousness about their social realities, and enact activism as part of the process of contributing to peace and safety.