Using community based and women-centred perspectives, this study explored experiences of unplanned motherhood during adolescence. Ten African teenage mothers from a semi-rural area in KwaZulu-Natal volunteered to meet once a week for eight weeks to discuss their experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. The findings are discussed in the context of the effect of teenage motherhood on self, on family and peer relationships, traditional Zulu customs, and community support. Current relationships with partners and concerns about the future are also reported. The results indicate the need for school-based programmes and parent groups for adolescent mothers that will enhance their ability to examine options with a view to establishing a trajectory towards better life outcomes. Community health workers were also identified as resource personnel for enabling teenage mothers in rural and semi-rural areas to cope with their concerns and develop a way of understanding them.
This second article in a three-part series published in the South African Journal of Higher Education describes the various ways in which "academic identity" informed the politics and shaped the outcomes of "restructuring" at the University of Durban Westville (UDW) in the late I990s. The authors argue that while ''restructuring" appears to be a process concerned with organisational and programmatic changes within the university, the effects of such reorganisation is to challenge established identities At UDW the restructuring process generate an intense micropolitics across the campus because it had the effect of recasting ethnic identities (the case of the Indian languages) disciplinary identities (the case of political science philosophy, and public administration) and professional identities (the case of the engineering faculty) The authors conclude that without grasping the underlying shifts in identity that inevitably accompany restructuring, university leaders and administrators run the risk of alienating the very constituencies from which they seek "buy-in" for radical change proposals. And without taking account of the politics of identity, attempts to theorise institutional change might falter by mistaking formal or superficial reorganisation for substantive or deep change.
This paper assesses the use of community-based peer groups as an intervention strategy to provide teenage mothers with an opportunity to share common experiences, receive social support and identify links between personal and social problems. The method utilized in a recent community project on teenage pregnancy is outlined. Over a period of 8 weeks a group of 10 teenage mothers met weekly to share their experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. The facilitators used various games and audio-visual aids to build rapport and to enhance willingness to discuss sensitive topics. The final session comprised a 1-day training workshop to enable the participants to act as co-facilitators for similar groups in the future. The evaluation indicated that the participants felt empowered by the opportunity to discuss common experiences and to have their perceptions affirmed by their peers. The potential value of this programme within the broader mental health context of South Africa is briefly discussed, and also the possibility of adding a consciousness-raising element to such groups.
This study has two aims, to examine aspects of Kohlberg's claims of universality within a unique research context and to explore differences in moral development between black and white South Africans. 81 participants from four different age groups were administered Form A of Kohlberg's moral judgement interviews. Analysis supported the age-relatedness of Kohlberg's stages of moral development and provided some support for the notion that the stages should be evident in various cultures. A significant difference in moral development between black and white groups in the 19- to 28-yr. age group was found. Further, black and white groups had different concerns when justifying moral choices. The results were discussed in the context of the South African system, which until recently has been one of institutionalised racial division.
In an early paper, the authors presented the findings of a qualitative research study which applied the self-psychological and object relations theories to the social and interpersonal dynamics surrounding adolescent sexual offending. One of the findings of the study was that informal and formal social responses to detected offenders encouraged the rapid foreclosure of deviant, bad and dangerous social, interpersonal and sexual identity and therefore militated against therapeutic personality reconstruction. The current paper widens the scope of such observations to include the victim, as well as the offender, and examines the role of the therapist in mediating between intrapsychic and interpersonal priorities carried within the offense dynamics and socially and legally defined exigencies surrounding child abuse. The authors suggest that appropriate devolution of therapeutic agency can be devolved to patients through the concept of the twinship transference while at the same time attending to necessary psychiatric, medical, social and legal processes.
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