Constructions of race and childhood in facebook comments on online articles relating to child sexual abuse
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Date
2018
Authors
Sumption, Nicola Jenni
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Abstract
Race, childhood and sexuality are three evocative concepts that often produce
strong reactions when raised as topics of discussion, particularly in the context of
South Africa’s history. Since the dawn of colonialism when human beings began to
share space, race has been linked to certain stereotypical characteristics, and over
time has also become both criminalised, and sexualised. Childhood, too, has also
been linked with certain constructions, with children globally becoming linked to
abstractions of purity, innocence and symbols of the health and wellbeing of the
nation. Instances where children are abused, particularly in cases of sexual abuse,
therefore provide an emotionally evocative landscape which is often representative
of perceptions of morality on a broader scale. When the perpetrators and victims of
these crimes become racialised, this landscape provides insights into constructions
of race, and race relations within the country broadly, and that is the aim of the
following research report. Facebook comments sections located on South African
news articles reporting on cases of child sexual abuse have therefore been analysed
using discourse analysis in order to better understand constructions of race and
childhood where these two concepts intersect with sexual abuse. The following
report details how these discourses reflect the deracialisation of childhood and the
ways in which the discourse of childhood trumps that of race; the limits of childhood
through analysis of an anomalous discourse in which the perpetrator was defended
and the victims were blamed; and the racialization of sexuality -an exploration of the
concept of a ‘culture of rape’, and the ways in which invisible whiteness is defended.
Description
A resarch report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Community-Based Counselling Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand, 2018
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Citation
Sumption, Nicola Jenni, (2018) Constructions of race and childhood in the facebook comments on online articles relating to child sexual abuse in South Africa, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, https://hdl.handle.net/10539/27123.