This paper discusses tensions and contradictions experienced by a group of psychologists in post-1994 South Africa as we struggled to develop an MA program in community psychology. Situating our work within the history of the subdiscipline and the historical context confronting South Africans in the "wake of apartheid," we explore models of community psychology that informed praxis under apartheid and contemporary challenges confronting a country in transition. We discuss three tensions that inform the ongoing program development. These include (1) the construction and deconstruction of Western and indigenous knowledge systems; (2) assessment and intervention at multiple levels and from differing value perspectives; and (3) paradoxes experienced by a team of university-educated, primarily White academic staff committed to challenging oppression. We conclude our discussion by suggesting that, within these shifting sands of economic, political, cultural, and institutional change community psychology must, of necessity, resist rigid self-definition and seek to position itself as a "work-in-progress." We suggest that this seemingly anomalous self-description may be suggestive for other community psychologists-in-the-making facing similar challenges within the majority world.
This paper is an attempt to address the severe paucity in both South African and international literature concerning eating disordered behaviour in young ballet dancers. Allegations suggest that for decades a conspiratorial silence has been maintained in the dancing world around the eating disordered behaviours of performers. The only serious suggestions alluding to high levels of eating disordered behaviour among performers in South Africa have appeared anecdotally in the popular media. Previous international research has suggested that dancers could not possibly maintain their sylph-like physiques with the amount of energy expended in daily training and simultaneously adhere to healthy nutritional standards. In fact, some studies cite high levels of malnutrition amongst members of the dance community (Peterson, 1984). The current research study confinns these findings showing highly significant differences in the drive for thinness in dancers compared with normative adolescent samples. Results also indicate tendencies to interpersonal distrust which could explain why this sensitive behaviour has been so difficult to identify and treat in the past. More detailed statistical analyses show that this sample of adolescent dancers exhibit strong similarities with eating disordered individuals, both anorexic and bulimic. These results provide the evidence required by interested parties to intervene in the neglected nutrition and psychological health of dancers.
Four years after South Africa's first democratic election, the 'new' South Africa, with its constitutionally enshrined rejection of prejudice and discrimination, has seen many changes. Not least of these has been ground-breaking policy decisions regarding the rights of women to freedom and equality. In South Africa, women are on the agenda: of trade unions, political organizations, aspects of civil society, universities and within grass-roots structures (Basilli, 1991). Whereas in apartheid years issues of gender were necessarily subsumed by issues of race, the current political climate has opened opportunities for women's issues to occupy a less marginal space.Despite South Africa's status as a world leader in progressive policy regarding women's issues, many South African women live amid stark contrasts between policy and practice. For example, although South Africa recently became one of the few countries in the world to recognize marital rape as a criminal offence, statistics show that South Africa has one of the highest rates of domestic violence and rape in the world. In 1984, it was estimated that 60 percent of marital relationships involved abuse (Shifman et al., 1998). The South African police estimate that a woman is raped every 35 seconds in South Africa and yet rape has the lowest conviction rate of all assault crimes (at 16 percent in 1993) (Shifman et al., 1998). Although policy values progressive praxis, lived experience of South African women highlights the radical disjuncture between progressive policy and oppressive practice. This contradiction was evident when President Nelson Mandela recently consoled a mother whose daughter had been murdered by assuring her that violent crimes are on the decrease in South Africa, but
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