Browsing by Author "Bowman, Brett"

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
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    Applying upstream interventions for interpersonal violence prevention: An uphill struggle in low- to middle-income contexts
    (Health Policy, 2010) Matzopoulos, Richard; Bowman, Brett; Mathews, Shanaaz; Myers, Jonny
    In South Africa’s Western Cape province, interpersonal violence was identified among the key prevention priorities in the provincial government’s Burden of Disease (BoD) Reduction project. To date, there are no adequate systematic reviews of the full range of potential intervention strategies. In response, available data and the literature on risk factors and prevention strategies for interpersonal violence were reviewed with a view to providing policy makers with an inventory of interventions for application. Given the predominance of upstream factors in driving the province’s rates of interpersonal violence, efforts to address its burden require an intersectoral approach. Achievable short-term targets are also required to offset the long-term nature of the strategies most likely to affect fundamental shifts. Documentation and evaluation will be important to drive long-term investment, ensure effectiveness and enable replication of successful programmes and should be considered imperative by interpersonal violence prevention policymakers in other low- to middle-income contexts.
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    Bridging risk and enactment: the role of psychology in leading psychosocial research to augment the public health approach to violence in South Africa
    (2014) Bowman, Brett; Stevens, Garth; Eagle, Gillian; Maztopoulos, Richard
    In the wake of apartheid, many in the South African health and social sciences shifted their orientation to understanding violence. Rather than approaching violence as a criminal problem, post-apartheid scholarship surfaced violence as a threat to national health. This re-orientation was well aligned with a global groundswell that culminated in the World Health Assembly’s 1996 declaration of violence as a public health problem. In response, researchers and other stakeholders have committed to the public health approach to violence in South Africa. Despite some unquestionable successes in applying this approach, violence remains a critical social issue and its recalcitrantly high rates signal that there is still much work to be done. One avenue for more focussed research concerns understanding the mechanisms by which upstream risk factors for violence are translated into actual enactments. We argue that South African psychology is well placed to provide greater resolution to this focus. We begin by providing a brief overview of the public health approach to violence. We then point to three specific areas in which the limits to our understanding of the way that downstream psychological and upstream social risk factors converge in situations of violence, compromise the theoretical and prevention traction promised by this approach and chart several basic psychosocial research coordinates for South African psychology. Steering future studies of violence by these coordinates would go some way to addressing these limits and, in so doing, extend on the substantial gains already yielded by the public health approach to violence in South Africa.
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    Children, pathology and politics: a genealogy of the paedophile in South Africa between 1944 and 2004
    (South African Journal of Psychology, 2010) Bowman, Brett
    By the early 1990s the paedophile as a ‘type’ of child sexual abuse (CSA) perpetrator was prioritised for study and intervention by the South African socio-medical sciences and cases of paedophilia featured prominently in the media reporting of the time. Drawing on the genealogical method as derived from Michel Foucault, this study aimed to account for this relatively recent emergence of the paedophile as an object of socio-medical study and social anxiety within the South African archive. Based on an analysis of archival texts against the backdrop of international biopolitics and local conditions of political possibility, the genealogy contends that the early figure of the paedophile was an instrument and effect of apartheid biopolitics. The paedophile was prioritised for research and escalated as social threat in the public imagination as part of the broader apartheid project aimed at protecting white hegemony through the ongoing surveillance of and health interventions directed towards South Africa’s white children. While the apartheid project constructed black children as posing fundamental threats to white supremacy, discourses beginning in the mid-1980s repositioned them as vulnerable victims of apartheid itself. It was from within these discourses that child sexual abuse (CSA) as a public health concern began to crystallise. By locating blackness within the fields of discipline and desire, the material conditions for an ever-expanding net of sexual surveillance were established. The study thus demonstrates that even the paedophile cannot be effectively researched without considering the historical co-ordinates that so powerfully contoured its emergence as an important object of study and social intervention within South Africa’s highly racialised systems of thought.
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    Children, Pathology and Politics:Genealogical Perspectives on the Construction of the Paedophile in South Africa
    (2006-11-17T10:51:47Z) Bowman, Brett
    Through an analysis informed by the genealogical method as derived from Foucault (1980a), this study examines the discourses and material conditions that have produced the South African paedophile. Archival texts and contemporary discursive matter are critically analysed against the backdrop of the material conditions of political possibility with which they intersected to construct the paedophile of the South African present. The study traces constructions of the paedophile as a relatively innocuous nuisance in a selected sequence of past historical periods through to the recidivism, sexual malice and aggression that define its contemporary characterisations. In South Africa, practices such as surveillance and disciplines the likes of demography and psychology became integral to the effective management and regulation of a distinctly racialised population. It was precisely through these forms of apartheid governance and power that the conditions for the emergence of the paedophile in South Africa were produced. This early paedophilia threatened the future purity of South African whiteness and therefore the integrity of the apartheid state. The racialised constructions of sexuality of the time precluded the assimilation of blackness into the discursive matrix of paedophiliac desire. The impending collapse of apartheid signalled the reconstitution of black children. While apartheid constructed black children as posing a fundamental threat to white hegemony, discourses beginning in the mid 1980s repositioned them as vulnerable victims of apartheid itself. It was from within these discourses that child sexual abuse (CSA) as a public health concern began to crystallise. Paedophilia however, remained a powerful component of this burgeoning discourse. Locating blackness within the fields of discipline and desire, in turn produced the material conditions for an everexpanding net of paedophiliac suspicion. This new biopolitical dispensation affixes the paedophiliac crime to all in its scope, such that the symptomatic desire of the once peripherally pathological paedophile can now be insinuated into the fantasies and practices of all of the citizens of a recently “liberated” and democratic South Africa.
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    Confessing sex in online student communities
    (Elsevier, 2017) Dominguez-Whitehead, Yasmine; Whitehead, Kevin A; Bowman, Brett
    In this paper, we examine Facebook “Confessions” sites associated with two large universities (one North American and one South African) to investigate the ways in which students interactionally negotiate normativity in discussions initiated by confessions relating to sex. The research is grounded in a Foucauldian framework that emphasizes the centrality of sex and sexuality. Our findings focus on two interrelated aspects of the data. The first concerns the features of the initial (anonymous) confessional posts, and the second relates to subsequent comments on the initial post. Close examination of initial posts offers insights into participants’ orientations to sexual acts, situations and beliefs that are treated as either normative or transgressive. Subsequent comments posted by participants reveal ways in which the “confessability” of confessions is interactionally ratified or contested. The findings thus demonstrate some ways in which normative sexuality is (re)produced, ratified, and contested within student online communities.
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    Data to action: An overview of crime, violence and injury in South Africa
    (Medical Research Council, 2008) Suffla, Shahnaaz; Van Niekerk, Ashley; Bowman, Brett; Matzopoulos, Richard
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    Emergence, risk and enactment: Advancing a multifocal approach to the study of violence
    (2021-08-25) Bowman, Brett
    Violence, in its many forms, remains a defining and seemingly intractable feature of modern life globally. This lecture outlines emergence, risk and enactment as three scholarly focal points for understanding violence in South Africa and beyond. It addresses how and why violence was first identified for study and intervention by the social and health sciences, describes the promises and limits of the current focus on risk, and reviews recent approaches to studying violence in situ that is, as it unfolds rather than how it is reported for counting or meaning making. The lecture then provides several suggestions for strategically fusing these focal points to produce the enhanced picture of violence required to take violence scholarship and intervention programming forward.
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    The second wave of violence scholarship: South African synergies with a global research agenda
    (Elsevier, 2015) Bowman, Brett; Stevens, Garth; Eagle, Gillian; Langa, Malose; Kramer, Sherianne; Kigua, Peace; Nduna, Mzikazi
    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.
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    The Role of Social Sciences in Advancing a Public Health Approach to Violence
    (Handbook of Social Sciences and Global Public Health, 2023-03-02) Brodie, Nechama; Bowman, Brett; Ncube, Vuyolwethu; Day, Sarah
    The public health approach maintains that violence is shaped by a range of risk factors that can be altered, mitigated, or even eliminated. onceptualizing violence as a type of “preventable disease” has provided important insights and interventions but also introduces limitations that may not be sufficiently acknowledged or understood within this perspective, particularly in the Global South. This chapter briefly outlines the history of the public health approach to violence in South Africa before describing its yields and limits. It then draws on recent studies, which suggest that the integration of interdisciplinary approaches emerging from a strong social science tradition can mitigate many of the conceptual limitations of the public health approach. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how approaches to violence grounded in these sorts of frameworks promise to deliver context-rich explanations of violence alongside the socio-ecological accounts for violence favored by a public health approach.
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    Understanding the experiential intersections of violence, gender identities and mental health, in the accounts of male parolees, in Gauteng, South Africa
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-03) Kallenbach, Jessica Jade; Bowman, Brett
    Imprisonment in South Africa has been categorized by untold hardships and suffering. Some of the major factors which influence life in correctional centres in South Africa, are embedded within violence, gender identities and mental health. These three constructs – violence, gender identities and mental health – appear embedded within the logic of the correctional centre regime. Thus, to understand the entirety of an offender’s experience during incarceration, it is necessary to investigate the intersections of violence, gender identities and mental health. This was achieved using a qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological approach to centre on the participants’ experiences. This research consisted of six semi-structured face-to-face interviews with male parolees at Zonderwater Correctional Community Centre. The interviews were based on a self-developed questions derived from research by Akhona (2014), Bantjes et al. (2017), Celinska and Sung (2014) and Gear and Ngubeni (2002). The interview questions were open-ended and focused on the participants’ subjective meanings, understandings and experiences regarding the dynamic intersection of violence, gender identities and mental health in South African correctional centres. The findings of this research revealed that the exposure to and involvement in violent acts are inextricably related to the fundamental deprivations that offenders are subjected to and the associated “pains of imprisonment”. This revelation demonstrated the negotiation of gender that takes place within these confines, making acts of sexual assault and violence deemed more acceptable. In navigating this system of violence and gender identity negotiations, the findings of this study illustrated the emotional and mental impact that this environment has on offenders. This highlighted the pertinent need for the Department of Correctional Centres (DCS) to address current gaps in the rehabilitation models they use. These gaps could account for the recidivism rate in South Africa. It is clear that the intersection of violence, gender identities and mental health play an influential role in determining the reported experiences of offenders. The study thus has the potential to contribute to policies, by illustrating that a multi-layered approach to rehabilitation is required.
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    Understanding the experiential intersections of violence, gender identities and mental health, in the accounts of male parolees, in Gauteng, South Africa
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-03-15) Kallenbach, Jessica Jade; Bowman, Brett
    Imprisonment in South Africa has been categorized by untold hardships and suffering. Some of the major factors which influence life in correctional centres in South Africa, are embedded within violence, gender identities and mental health. These three constructs – violence, gender identities and mental health – appear embedded within the logic of the correctional centre regime. Thus, to understand the entirety of an offender’s experience during incarceration, it is necessary to investigate the intersections of violence, gender identities and mental health. This was achieved using a qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological approach to centre on the participants’ experiences. This research consisted of six semi-structured face-to-face interviews with male parolees at Zonderwater Correctional Community Centre. The interviews were based on a self-developed questions derived from research by Akhona (2014), Bantjes et al. (2017), Celinska and Sung (2014) and Gear and Ngubeni (2002). The interview questions were open-ended and focused on the participants’ subjective meanings, understandings and experiences regarding the dynamic intersection of violence, gender identities and mental health in South African correctional centres. The findings of this research revealed that the exposure to and involvement in violent acts are inextricably related to the fundamental deprivations that offenders are subjected to and the associated “pains of imprisonment”. This revelation demonstrated the negotiation of gender that takes place within these confines, making acts of sexual assault and violence deemed more acceptable. In navigating this system of violence and gender identity negotiations, the findings of this study illustrated the emotional and mental impact that this environment has on offenders. This highlighted the pertinent need for the Department of Correctional Centres (DCS) to address current gaps in the rehabilitation models they use. These gaps could account for the recidivism rate in South Africa. It is clear that the intersection of violence, gender identities and mental health play an influential role in determining the reported experiences of offenders. The study thus has the potential to contribute to policies, by illustrating that a multi-layered approach to rehabilitation is required.