Surfacing (im)possible victims: the role of gender, sexuality and power in constructing the conditions of possibility for victims of female sex abuse

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by thesis in the field of Psychology. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2014Female sex abuse (FSA) has recently emerged as an object of enquiry in the academy and medico-legal systems both globally and in South Africa. However, the academic research is primarily focused on perpetrators, resulting in very limited information on victims. Victim data that are available are based mainly on studies conducted with perpetrators. FSA victimhood is underexplored and many victims remain invisible to the criminal justice and health systems and are barely discernible as objects of human science knowledge. Despite the accent on vulnerable populations and human rights in the contemporary world, there is very little work on precisely why these victims remain invisible. Accordingly, this research aims to identify the cultural conditions of possibility for FSA victimhood as a means to advance contemporary critical understandings of the role of gender and sexuality as instrument-effects of modern power. The study’s objectives were achieved by interviewing persons who selfidentified as FSA victims. A Foucauldian informed discourse analysis was employed to interpret the transcriptions of these interviews and to explore conditions of possibility for FSA victimhood as they were constructed in the interview context. The findings illustrate precisely how deeply engrained constructions of gender and sexuality both produce and constrain the possibilities for reporting, disclosing and self-identifying victimhood. Overall, a particular configuration of access to nonnormative psychological, gender and ‘sex’ discourses, mostly mediated by the internet and incited through the confessional context of the interview, provides the possibilities for an identification as a victim of female sex abuse. These points of identification are coordinates for disrupting normative understandings of gender, sexuality and power in sex abuse and thus constitute the beginnings of a counterknowledge on transgressive sexualities. This counter-knowledge will further contribute to critical accounts of the way that power/knowledge produces, reifies and naturalises human subjects through technologies of sexuality

Paradigm revolutions and discourse debates

[BOOK REVIEW]Parker, Ian (2015) Psychology after the crisis: Scientific paradigms and political debate. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-84872-207-1 pbk. 126 pages   Parker, Ian (2015) Psychology after deconstruction: Erasure and social reconstruction. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-8487-209-5 pbk. 136 pages Parker, Ian (2015) Psychology after discourse analysis: Concepts, methods, critique. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-84872-211-8 pbk. 126 pages   Critical and discursive psychology have long been the sites to contest the roles of language, institutional knowledge and power structures in the maintenance of the discipline of psychology. For over 25 years, Ian Parker has been a key leading figure in the development of these debates. Until now, some of the central ideas of this critical work have remained disparate and scattered, this dispersion being further reinforced by the sheer vastness and diversity of approaches that consider themselves “critical”. In his Routledge-series, Psychology after critique, for the first time, Parker brings together a reworked range of his most important papers to present a focused and radical presentation of key debates that he argues emerge from an early “paradigm crisis” in the psychological field. As a response to the general discontent with the laboratory experiment as the primary mode of framing, investigating and understanding the “psychological”, this crisis enabled the materialisation of qualitative research as a “paradigm revolution” that Parker argues paved the way for a critical and thus a political psychology, in both its conceptual and methodological forms

Discourse and power in the self-perceptions of incarcerated South African female sexual offenders.

Female sexual offenders have recently become the subject of increased medical, legal and public attention. However, the medical and legal systems insist that female sex crimes are rare regardless of the fact that when sexual victimization experiences are surveyed, the incidence of female perpetrated sex crimes is often higher than expected. Additionally, lay discourses concerning female sexual perpetration remain charged with expressions of disbelief and the vast majority of attention on sexual crimes therefore remains focused on male offenders. As a result, female sexual offenders are understood and treated differently to their male counterparts in the media and medico-legal contexts. In light of the continued denial of female sexual perpetration, this research explored how such beliefs around female sexuality shape the self-knowledge of female sexual offenders. By doing so, this investigation aimed to illuminate how disciplinary power acts to produce self-knowledge that, in turn, leads to the discursive coordinates by which female sexual offenders come to define themselves. This was achieved by interviewing female sexual perpetrators and thereafter drawing on critical discourse analysis in order to interpret the transcriptions of these interviews. The results demonstrated that the participants’ subjective experiences as agents and non-agents in the perpetration of sex crimes relied on social constructions of men, women, motherhood, sexuality and religion. All of the offenders constructed themselves as characteristically female- maternal, passive, vulnerable, victimised and innately virtuous. Their responses drew discernibly on rationalising discourse, gendered discourse, inversions of their femaleness, perceptions of the legal and correctional systems, institutionalised discourse, discourse on rehabilitation and expressions of morality and docility. Most of these discursive patterns, as both instruments and effects of power, simultaneously replicate and reproduce broader social discursive practices that imply that women are harmless, nurturing and incapable of female sexual perpetration. The availability of medical, academic and legal discourse on gender and sexuality allowed the participants to draw on victim discourse, histories of abuse and claims of psychological ailments to justify their crimes. These rationalisations also worked in conjunction with gendered discursive strategies that implied that men are aggressive perpetrators whilst women are harmless victims. As such, the perceived responsibility for the participants’ crimes was most often displaced onto their male accomplices. In this way, the participants upheld their subjective innocence as well as assisted in the maintenance of the construction of the female sexual perpetrator as an unfathomable and impossible construct. This was further emphasised by the fact that not a single participant believed she was guilty of a crime. Such a belief is in line with gendered constructions of criminality as a predominantly male activity. As such, the participants’ reproductions of traditional sexual scripts foreclosed alternative understandings of female sexual perpetration. While dominant patriarchal structures utilise discourse as a means to transmit, produce and reinforce power, this study drew on discourse as a means to resist traditional gendered understandings of sexual offending and to create new configurations of knowledge power by offering counter-knowledge of sex crimes. In doing so, academics, policy makers and the general public have access to a different and novel understanding of female sexuality in light of sexual offending. This has practical implications for the acknowledgement and awareness of female sexual perpetration as well as for future preventative efforts

Kiedis’s Scar Tissue: A Phenomenological Psychobiography

This study uses a psychobiographic research method as a means to explore and describe the life of lyricist, Anthony Kiedis. Kiedis’s history is investigated through the lens of Erik Erikson’s theory of identity development. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as a means to platform the psychobiographic methodology, this study explores Kiedis’s creativity and writing as intrinsic aspects of his identity. In addition, the analysis attempts to understand how Kiedis resolved his identity crises, and puts forward a presentation of Kiedis’s subjective experiences of his identity development. Through this in-depth analysis, the study concludes that Kiedis is engaged in an infinite moratorium, and in so doing demonstrates the value of using the combined methods of IPA and psychobiography to understand the human condition

Young Black Men’s Risk to Firearm Homicide in Night Time

Based on data from the South African National Injury Mortality Surveillance System (NIMSS), an epidemiological surveillance system of fatal injuries, this article reports on a retrospective analysis of the data on homicide in Johannesburg, South Africa. In South Africa, as is the case in other African countries, the collection of comprehensive, quality injury data, on which inferential analyses can be conducted, remains a challenge. As such, the analysis here was drawn from the NIMSS for homicides in Johannesburg for the years 2001 to 2005, as this period off ered one the most complete datasets for homicide for the city. Focusing on the 5153 night time homicide victims, a binary logistic regression model was utilised to identify the likelihood of specifi c risk factors occurring in certain groups of people and contexts. The results illustrate that sex, race and time at night are particularly important risk factors for night time fi rearm homicide and the most at-risk population for night time homicide is urbanised young black men. The article concludes with a discussion of implications the results might have for preventative eff orts, calling for programming targeted at young black men. Limitations of the investigation are noted

Action and community-based research: improving local governance practices through the community scorecard

Social science researchers in the global South, and in South Africa particularly, utilise research methods in innovative ways in order to respond to contexts characterised by diversity, racial and political tensions, socioeconomic disparities and gender inequalities. These methods often remain undocumented – a gap that this book starts to address. Written by experts from various methodological fields, Transforming Research Methods in the Social Sciences is a comprehensive collation of original essays and cutting-edge research that demonstrates the variety of novel techniques and research methods available to researchers responding to these context-bound issues. It is particularly relevant for study and research in the fields of applied psychology, sociology, ethnography, biography and anthropology. In addition to their unique combination of conceptual and application issues, the chapters also include discussions on ethical considerations relevant to the method in similar global South contexts. Transforming Research Methods in the Social Sciences has much to offer to researchers, professionals and others involved in social science research both locally and internationally

Non-experimental research designs: Investigating the spatial distribution and social ecology of male homicide

Institute for Social and Health Studies (ISHS

The second wave of violence scholarship: South African synergies with a global research agenda

Violence is a serious public health and human rights challenge with global psychosocial impacts across the human lifespan. As a recently classified middle-income country (MIC), South Africa experiences high levels of interpersonal, self-directed and collective violence, taking physical, sexual and/or psychological forms. Careful epidemiological research has consistently shown that complex causal pathways bind the social fabric of structural inequality, socio-cultural tolerance of violence, militarized masculinity, disrupted community and family life, and erosion of social capital, to individual-level biological, developmental and personality-related risk factors to produce this polymorphic profile of violence in the country. Engaging with a concern that violence studies may have reached something of a theoretical impasse, ‘second wave’ violence scholars have argued that the future of violence research may not lie primarily in merely amassing more data on risk but rather in better theorizing the mechanisms that translate risk into enactment, and that mobilize individual and collective aspects of subjectivity within these enactments. With reference to several illustrative forms of violence in South Africa, in this article we suggest revisiting two conceptual orientations to violence, arguing that this may be useful in developing thinking in line with this new global agenda. Firstly, the definition of our object of enquiry requires revisiting to fully capture its complexity. Secondly, we advocate for the utility of specific incident analyses/case studies of violent encounters to explore the mechanisms of translation and mobilization of multiple interactive factors in enactments of violence. We argue that addressing some of the moral and methodological challenges highlighted in revisiting these orientations requires integrating critical social science theory with insights derived from epidemiology and, that combining these approaches may take us further in understanding and addressing the recalcitrant range of forms and manifestations of violence.BB201

Research shouldn't be a dirty word, but race is a problematic construct

The use of race in research is always problematic as it is loaded with dangers and unforeseeable consequences. Where race (or ethnicity interpreted as colour-based) is used as a variable or an ‘explanation’, politically constructed racial categories are reproduced, thereby perpetuating stigma, discrimination, and racism. It was precisely this use of race that was exemplified in the recent publication, and subsequent retraction, of an article by Nieuwoudt, Dickie, Coetsee, Engelbrecht, and Terblanche (2019), titled, ‘Age- and education-related effects on cognitive functioning in Colored South African women’, as published in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition: A Journal on Normal and Dysfunctional Development.Article is an editorialstatus: publishe