You say violence, rape, murder. I say love, peace and happiness!



Love can offer you a place of safety



There is all this enraged talk about rape, violence and murders in South Africa right now - and rightly so. But we have known for a while that there are just too many people being murdered, too many being raped, and that crime and violence are highly prevalent. We have known this for a long time.

In an earlier post, a colleague stated that: 

"the leaders are either out of ideas how to turn things around, restore meaning to the lives of these young men and women, or they couldn't give a toss for the young black men and women".

I can agree with the possibility of the second bit, but tend to disagree with the first part. It may not be that the leaders have run out of ideas, and instead that the options that might work are the options that they regard as insignificant. The options that might work, like paying attention and changing the small, daily aspects of our lives, that might make the difference are not even given a look-in. Small things like the need for love and the meaning of happiness and what they mean to young men.

So after interviewing a few young black South African males about the importance of love and happiness in ideologies of masculinity, I found that most young men need love. They actually do. Really.

This got me thinking and reading even more about men, love and happiness. Then I had to remind myself that I am a psychologist too, not just a researcher. I am new in this business of being a psychologist, so I forget sometimes.

Psychology, as you might know, is a field that could make significant contributions to the current depressing state South Africa finds itself in, emotionally speaking. The discipline continues to underchieve, but it has such a great potential for this society. Through the discipline psychology we learn the undeniable role of emotions in our lives, and currently, for me, the importance of paying attention to the affective lives of young black men.

Of course, cognitions and behaviour are important, but even though we all would agree that we are "feeling beings", affect tends to be regarded with suspicion by business and political creatures, or otherwise relegated to the private sphere. However, through psychological studies prove again and again that emotions like love, hope, gratitude, shame, and happiness can actually change a person's perceptions and outlook on life. But let me stick to love. As one of the young men I interviewed stated:

"since I met her, she has shown me so much love, and I have become a responsible man, I do not only think of myself, but I have to think of her too. When I buy myself a chocolate, I know I have to buy for baby too..".

So please tell me you don't think love can make a difference in this world. I will wait for your response.

Of course this is not irrefutable proof about the importance of love in young men's lives. But it tells you this young man thinks love has changed him. 

Anyway, all I am saying is that our political leaders and government directors and corporate heads need to forget, for a moment at least, about the traditionalist way of doing things as being the only way that works. Don't buy more guns and bullets for the police to intimidate black young men. Take down the boom gates. Stop building prisons. Ignore that traditionalist leader's voice inside that says love if for "birds". Young men, like young women, need love. Black men, like white men, need to be cared for and to care for others. We need to teach these men that it is okay to love, to be loved. That it's not so bad to laugh, you know. That being happy is just what one needs sometimes, maybe ultimately. That it is okay to cry if you want to. Pat Conroy puts it very well for me when he says

"I thought that at birth men are allowed just as many tears as women, but because they are forbidden to shed them, they die long before women do, with their hearts exploding or their blood pressure rising or their livers eaten away by alcohol, because that lake of grief inside them has no outlet. Men die because their faces were not watered enough".  

So in my quest to understand how young men experience love and happiness I came across more than I had expected. The look of a young men who is in love and is not ashamed to say that he is, the look on his face when he talks about his loved one and how she has influenced the positive change in his life...just priceless.

I really do believe that love can make a difference. Maybe the rates of murder won't drop by tomorrow, maybe there won't be less cases of rape in the next week, but surely in the long run we will have a society filled with caring, loving, responsible men who are good fathers too and not men who will abuse their families. If men love, in the long run we won't have 12-year-olds who repeatedly rape their 3-year-old sisters. We will not have men who abuse other young men. We shall not have have young men who are frustrated by the fact that they cannot meet the standards of white men or older, wealthier black men. 

We all suffer from the effects of violent crimes in one way or the other. And currently the situation of continuous traumatisation is just causing further and widespread decay in our societies and hearts. We are causing all manner of injury to ourselves, by ignoring our emotions. Violence has become so normalised, so ordinary. Murder is normalised, rape is normalised, abuse is normalised, and all these and more are reported on our televisions and radios eachday and all because, YES, they are happening.

But so is laughter, so are acts of peace: these are happening too. What if we made love, like a normal thing. How about getting strange and weird stories on television and radio about tenderness to each other. What about each of us making it okay for the 5-year-old to see mom kissing dad, granddad embracing uncle, friends enjoying each other. What if we teach the kid to understand that it is good to love and see if there will be a change later on.

I have a good feeling things will change for the better then. Not instantly, but they will. If, that is, we try something different. Like teach love. If we let ourselves change traditions that are not getting us anywhere. Like pay close attention to positive emotions. If we  transform ourselves and this way change our societies. Like hugging a young man today. 

We won’t stop the rapes till we stop the murders in South Africa

Last night CNN flighted the story of the gang-rape of a young South African woman. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/18/world/africa/south-africa-rape-video/index.html. It made me feel sick, shamed and nauseous to be a South African man. Angry too.

The story ran several times during different programmes. I am informed that other global news networks also ran with the story. Two of the guests on CCN were the Lulu Xingwana, minister of women, children and people with disabilities and Nomboniso Gasa, former chair of the commission for gender equality. I thought their comments were ok, but nothing new.  They spoke about the enduring legacy of apartheid. They spoke about how unacceptable the levels of violence against women are. Ms Gasa challenged some of the views put forward, and though she was overly gentle, I was glad she didn't let it go without comment.

Then, after recomposing myself, I once again felt that the reportage and comment on rape in South Africa does more than just shame and anger us. It conceals the true picture of what we are facing. It is remiss for news reports and commentators on violence in South Africa not to point out for the country and world that being raped is very bad indeed, but so is being murdered. The rates of death from interpersonal violence for young black men go as high as approximately 500/100 000. That’s a mindboggling number. In comparison, female homicides rates are around 24/100 000 - very high relative to  worldwide figures, but nowhere near the prospects faced by young black males in Nyanga, Thembisa and other low-income urban areas.

Rape is ugly, beastly and can shatter a woman's life, and at rates of approximately 132 per 100 000 for total sexual offences as reported by the SAPS for last year, it might well be true that a young South African woman has more chances of being raped than learn how to read (as CNN said). I doubt it though, and would appreciate it if anyone who knows lets me know where do they get these likelihoods? I don't think it helps us understand any better the violence South Africa is facing to say things like a young black man is more likely to die violently than get a job. That is vulgarly sensationalist. It is enough to state that we are in deep trouble as a society.  

In addressing rape and violence against women, we are where we are still because we refuse to see violence in its different forms in South Africa as affecting women, girls, men, boys. Our response remains piecemeal and our advances against violence slow because the sexual and gender violence against women is inextricably connected to physical violence against and between men. We won’t stop the rapes till we stop the murders. We won’t stop murdering each other with such abandon till we put a stop to the sexual violence.  

Some people say the young will revolt one day. I am afraid the revolution went viral a while back. Offline it's been here for over a decade. Don't just look at the numbers of service delivery protests. Look also at the numbers of rape and homicide; look at the figures for attempted murder, assault GBH and common assault. Look at the suicides and transport-related deaths. Look at the slow death from – where do I start. Hunger, alcoholism, drugs, fat, bad education, hopelessness, they also kill, slowly. Look at AIDS-related deaths. Because we in the middle classes, black and white, do not get the brunt of it, we ignore the direct violence until it gets on CNN, BBC, and Aljazeera. Ignore it till one is directly affected, raped, killed, burgled. The revolt of the young is to shame us, for they long ago ran out of shame.

This is a leaderless revolution because from Mandela to Zuma, without exception, from Khoza to Motsepe and every political and business leader in between, the leaders either are out of ideas how to turn things around, restore meaning to the lives of these young men and women, or they couldn't give a toss for the young black women and men. Forget apartheid, this democracy is a bitch.

The revolution is not for new rights for the old rights and freedom are just not working for them. They don't care about hurting others because they are hurting. They don’t' care because no one cares about them until they get on telly. Maybe young black men may still get to eat the rich in the future, but for now they are starting with their peers and the poor. Welcome to young black male hell.