Induced abortion among a group of black South African women: An exploratory study of factors influencing short- term post-abortion adjustment

Magister Psychologiae - MPsychThroughout recorded history, women have resorted to abortion to terminate unwanted pregnancies, despite religious and legal sanctions, and frequently at significant personal risk. Abortion is, therefore, one of the oldest and at the same time most controversial of approaches to fertility control. More than most procedures, abortion is embedded in a social context that has implications for psychological responses of women. However, whilst South Africa's restrictive abortion legislation has come to the forefront of public scrutiny in recent years, research on the psychological aspects of induced abortion among black South African women has received minimal attention from social science researchers. This consideration requires redress since South Africa's abortion policy has undoubtedly had an impact on black women's mental health. Although unwanted pregnancy and the decision to abort are frequently perceived as stressful, evidence to date suggests that women do not experience severe negative reactions to abortion. Nevertheless, research has shown that some women do experience negative reactions following abortion. The responses of these women, placed within the context of the large numbers of black women who procure abortions and the immense social significance of the issue, point to a need to identify those women who are at risk for experiencing difficulties after abortion. This thesis, therefore, aimed to explore women's interpretations of the factors that influence short-term post-abortion adjustment. Five women who had procured illegal abortions were interviewed. A thematic analysis was utilised to explore participants' accounts of their abortion experiences. Furthermore, the present inquiry attempted to identify, through participants' discourses, psycho-social factors that may serve as 'risk factors' for poor post-abortion adjustment. The findings revealed that the abortion experience varies in the amount and type of stress it engenders for women. The manner in which these women responded to the procedure was found to be a joint function of their psychological state and of the social milieu in which the abortion occurred. Participants' post-abortion adjustment was found to be significantly influenced by the extent to which they experienced decision difficulty, the nature of the social environment surrounding the abortion process and individual coping responses. Thus, the findings of the study accentuate the need for counselling interventions designed to facilitate adjustment to abortion. These issues are likely to become of increased importance as the South African government deliberates on its public policy on abortion

Homicidal strangulation in an urban South African context

Text in EnglishAs an external cause of death, strangulation represents an extreme and particularly pernicious form of violence. Following the evidence gap in the extant literature, the current research examined the incidence, distributions, individual and situational predictors, and structural determinants of homicidal strangulation in the City of Johannesburg for the period 2001-2010. The thesis is structured around four discrete but interrelated studies, which collectively offer an initial contribution to the body of scholarship on homicide generally, and on the characteristics and patterns of strangulation homicide specifically. The research drew on data from the National Injury Mortality Surveillance System and the South African National Census. Study I is a descriptive study that quantifies the extent of homicidal strangulation in the City of Johannesburg and describes its distribution by characteristics of person, time, place and alcohol consumption. The remaining studies are analytical in focus, and are aimed at explaining homicidal strangulation in the City of Johannesburg in terms of its determinants. These studies are differentiated by their focus on individual-level and neighbourhood-level risks. Study II assesses overall homicide strangulation risk in relation to all the other leading causes of homicide. Study III undertakes further disaggregation to investigate homicidal strangulation risk by gender specifically. Study IV considers the socio-structural correlates and geographic distributions of fatal strangulation. The study engages select micro-level and macro-level theories that focus on the intersection between vulnerability and routine activities, gender and neighbourhood derivatives of violence to explain the social ecology of lethal strangulation. The research findings demonstrate that homicidal strangulation in the City of Johannesburg is a unique phenomenon that is distinct from overall homicide. As the fourth leading cause of homicide in the City of Johannesburg, fatal strangulation exhibits a marked female preponderance in victimisation and distinctive socio-demographic, spatio-temporal, sex-specific and neighbourhood-level variation in risk. The study is aligned with the increasing trend towards disaggregating overall homicide into more defined and conceptually meaningful categories of homicide. The study may represent one of the first empirical investigations that also attempts to offer theoretically-derived explanations of homicidal strangulation in South Africa. Fatal strangulation is a multi-faceted phenomenon that requires multi-dimensional and multi-level interventions directed at several points of its social ecology.PsychologyD. Phil. (Psychology

Socio-demographic and spatio-temporal predictors of homicidal strangulation in the City of Johannesburg, South Africa

The literature on the predictors of disaggregated homicide rates exposes a distinct void with respect to strangulation fatality. The current study examines the effects of socio-demographic and spatio-temporal variables on the risk for homicidal strangulation relative to the other leading causes of homicide in the City of Johannesburg for the period 2001-2010. The data were derived from the National Injury  Mortality Surveillance System. A series of logistic regressions were performed to assess the independent associations between each of the predictor variables and fatal strangulation relative to the other leading causes of homicide. The analysis revealed that there are several unique socio-demographic and spatio-temporal factors that differentiate homicidal strangulation risk from the risk for other causes of  homicide. Sex was found to be the strongest predictor of homicidal strangulation, with the risk significantly higher for females. The elderly (60+ years), were found to be at marked risk of fatal strangulation, as were children between the ages of 0-14 years. The most noteworthy predictive effects for temporality were observed for time of day and day of the week, with daytime and weekdays representing the periods of higher risk. In the current analyses, scene of death did not emerge as a significant predictor of strangulation homicide. The study supports the contention that differentiated risk profiles for the different causes of homicide are important to recognise and delineate for the purposes of strangulation homicide prevention

Socio-demographic and spatio-temporal predictors of homicidal strangulation in the City of Johannesburg, South Africa

The literature on the predictors of disaggregated homicide rates exposes a distinct void with respect to strangulation fatality. The current study examines the effects of socio-demographic and spatio-temporal variables on the risk for homicidal strangulation relative to the other leading causes of homicide in the City of Johannesburg for the period 2001-2010. The data were derived from the National Injury Mortality Surveillance System. A series of logistic regressions were performed to assess the independent associations between each of the predictor variables and fatal strangulation relative to the other leading causes of homicide. The analysis revealed that there are several unique socio-demographic and spatio-temporal factors that differentiate homicidal strangulation risk from the risk for other causes of homicide. Sex was found to be the strongest predictor of homicidal strangulation, with the risk significantly higher for females. The elderly (60+ years), were found to be at marked risk of fatal strangulation, as were children between the ages of 0-14 years. The most noteworthy predictive effects for temporality were observed for time of day and day of the week, with daytime and weekdays representing the periods of higher risk. In the current analyses, scene of death did not emerge as a significant predictor of strangulation homicide. The study supports the contention that differentiated risk profiles for the different causes of homicide are important to recognise and delineate for the purposes of strangulation homicide prevention.Institute for Social and Health Studies (ISHS

Risk factors for female and male homicidal strangulation in Johannesburg, South Africa

Background. There is a paucity of research on homicidal strangulation by gender. Objectives. A sex-disaggregated and comparative research approach was used to investigate individual-level risk factors for female and male homicidal strangulation in Johannesburg, South Africa (2001 - 2010). Methods. Data were drawn from the National Injury Mortality Surveillance System. Logistic regressions were used to examine associations between each of the independent variables and homicidal strangulation in females and males relative to all other female and male homicides, respectively. Results. The risk of fatal strangulation was high for both females and males aged ≥60 years, but markedly high only for male children and adolescents. Temporal risk for females was undifferentiated for day of the week, and the risk for males was high during weekdays. Females were more likely to be strangled in public places, and males in private locations. Conclusions. The study underlines the importance of disaggregating homicide by external cause and gender.Institute for Social and Health Studies (ISHS

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.Institute for Social and Health Studies (ISHS

Understanding community violence: A critical realist framework for community psychology

Critical realism can unsettle a number of orthodoxies that surround the study of community violence within community psychology. This is to say, because critical realism is embraced so rarely by community psychologists, it can institute a parallax shift within the discipline, whereby we are granted alternative ways of perceiving violence within community contexts. Drawing on transdisciplinary thought, we offer in this article a retroductive framework for studying community violence. This framework, we argue, can facilitate an understanding of structurally violent causal mechanisms through interrogating how direct—or observable—violence intersects with epistemic violence (i.e., harmful and inaccurate representation). Demonstrating the efficacy of this framework, we provide an example from our work, where participants from a low‐income South African community produced and screened a documentary film on community violence and collective resistance. Reflecting on the ways by which this film engaged xenophobic violence in particular, we examine how community members used the film to trouble perceptions of community violence and advance a multifaceted antiviolence agenda. By way of conclusion, we consider how our framework can be used to inform a critical realist community psychology, wherein violent social structures are analyzed against the agentic community‐driven initiatives which oppose these structures.Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa & South African Medical Research Council‐University of South Africa Masculinity and Health Research UnitInstitute for Social and Health Studies (ISHS

Decoloniality as a social issue for psychological study

This article provides a theoretical introduction to a two-installment special issue on decolonial approaches to the psychological study of social issues. Decolonial approaches propose that colonial violence is not confined to the distant past (i.e., colonialism); instead, it persists as coloniality: racialized ways of thinking and being associated with Eurocentric global domination. Rather than characterizing modernity and its individualist psychological manifestations as progress, decolonial theorists use modernity/coloniality to illuminate the colonial violence inherent in the modern order and inseparable from modern individualist development. One implication of a decolonial framework is that colonial violence extends beyond physical space to psychological space, such that complete liberation requires forms of psychological decolonization. Accordingly, articles in this first installment consider decoloniality as a social issue for psychological analysis not only to address historical trauma, internalized inferiority, and other forms of psychological violence among the (formerly) colonized but also to recognize the coloniality in features of Eurocentric modernity—e.g., mainstream environmentalism, prevailing articulations of human rights education, or modern individualist lifeways—that appear liberal or progressive.Institute for Social and Health Studies (ISHS

Neighbourhood correlates of homicidal strangulation in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa

Drawing on the structural theories of strain and control, the current study examined the neighbourhood correlates of homicidal strangulation in the City of Johannesburg in South Africa for the period 2001-2010. A principal components analysis was conducted, and binomial regression models fitted to examine the relationships between neighbourhood characteristics and fatal strangulation. The results demonstrated partial support for the theories of strain and control and indicated that the effect of theoretically and empirically derived socio-structural factors on homicidal strangulation is variant for different socio-demographic groups, with significant effects most distinct for blacks. The study recognises strangulation as a unique phenomenon that is distinct from overall homicide.Institute for Social and Health Studies (ISHS

A multimodal reading of public protests

Public protests in (un)democratic polities, reflective of discursive articulations of resistance and material expressions of struggle, seek to disrupt prevailing unjust societal, political and cultural practices. The insurrectionist purposes of protests are often in contravention of public order regimens, which seek to regulate enactments of public protests, minimise the disruptions inher ent to protests and legitimise those defined as non-violent. This produces a non-violent–violent protest binary, which fails to account for the dynamic nature of protests. This study, critical of the non-violent–violent binary, assumed a multimodal analysis of unedited video footage of a selected authorised protest in the City of Cape Town, South Africa to understand the rapid discursive and kinaesthetic shifts that may occur within single protest events. The findings suggest that protests shift between moments of resistance and insurgency and moments of appeasement of official scripts. As such, protest enactments within a particular discursive space seem to be constitutive of resistance to power, insurgence and cooperation as well as actions defined either as legitimate or illegitimate by official discourse.Institute for Social and Health Studies (ISHS