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.

Everybody needs someone to look out for them, but the social fabric around young white men doesn't need as much repairing

Earlier this month I was asked during a public conversation why white young men do not die at the rates of black young men. Who is protecting them? Or is that what's protecting them?

I am experiencing some kind of Groundhog Day. I feel as if I said this yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. If you have heard, don't stop reading.

As you may know, levels of violent death are never uniformly distributed across the sexes. That's a well-established finding from research. Males die from violence at much higher rates than females. You may also be aware that age is a significant predictor of dying from violence.  

But here are other variables that put an individual at risk of dying from violence: how much money you have, where you live, and race among others. There are studies from the United States and from Europe, and a few from Africa, in support of this. In South Africa you are more likely to die violently, on average, when you are male, in your late teens or early adulthood years, when you are black or coloured as opposed to white and Indian, live in a poor and low-income neighbourhood, live in a metro than in the more rural municipalities, live in Cape Town in comparison to Tshwane. Those are only some of the variables.

However, the question I was asked though is why: why are young white men at a decreased risk from dying prematurely? One of the major reasons is because men who do not achieve socially respected masculinity are likely live in or get into violent situations. Say that again? They are likely to live in or get into violent situations. That is to say, an attempt to achieve culturally valued manhood is interwoven with other reasons. Some of these are structural and others personal.

Studies show that, for instance, Khayelitsha has higher levels of homicide than Constantia. Why is this so? Because young men who live in Constantia are better protected against assaults or murder. It’s not only because of the alarms, spikes, and barbed wires. It’s because of conditions in the two areas. It’s because of their life circumstances, which in the end reduces the choices available to them to make something of themselves, that young men in Khayelitsha, most of whom are unemployed, will put themselves at greater risk of victimisation while trying to get recognition and success as men.

It's a damning situation. You can die slowly and on your feet from poverty, hunger, and distress. Or you can go out, in a world that says risk is good, take your chances and be shot to death.

Of course the risk a stock market trader takes is different from the risk a would-be bank robber takes. They are all trying to get money. But the risks for the latter can be deadly. The one with his qualifications has a lawful space to take risks with other people's monies; the other, whose education has left him standing at the corner with few prospects, has very few opportunities this side of the law and so steps outside of it. 

This is not to condone criminality. It is to explain the difference between young white men and young black men. The difference, which looks like one of race, like it is essentially racial in nature, is actually about historical economic advantages and the legacies of inequality. Social and economic advantages mean life advantages. It contributes towards a longer, safer, and happier life. Historical socio-economic discrimination imply that young black men today will find it harder to enjoy a happy, protected and long life.

But they were born after apartheid, I have heard it said. Their parents were not. Those parents raised them, for better or worse. Those parents may not have jobs today. If they have, those parents are not able to support them to go to university or with connections to get an internship into a good company. And most of those young men who die still live with the abjection that their parents experienced under apartheid.    

In societies that are racially and economically highly unequal the odds to get respect are stacked against young poor black men then. Whereas young middle-class and rich white men live in conditions that offer them protection, young poor black men have decreased safety nets. The conditions that make some young men better protected include things like a having a room of one's own instead of living in a small crowded house. Being able to spend time surfing the net as opposed to standing at the corner also helps. Surfing the net will keep you off the street. Having a job as opposed to standing at the corner will keep you out of trouble for a chunk of the day. Having a car instead of walking past a group of young men standing at the corner will get you past the corner. If that corner is next to a place where people drink, that adds to the risk. If you like to get drunk, it does not help: alcohol tends to make some people more likely to get into fights. If you are a teenager or young adult and your own father and mother are drinkers or even just disengaged from you, that removes a layer of social protection. All these factors multiply the risk as they interact. 

There are other factors that put some and not other young black men at increased risk of premature death. These are psychosocial.  They are gendered. Because of their psychosocial vulnerabilities and feelings of not being valued by society, young men may lash out at those nearest to them. The historical gender system denied their fathers their manhood which the sons are trying to regain, the traditionalist cultural system of gender has miseducated them, the education system has warped their sense of social equality, and the economic system excludes them. Men’s violence, then, often enough functions towards deflecting their internal states of vulnerability of being a surplus group. They get violent with women or engage in fights with other men to deal with feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, abandonment or insecurity. Some of this violence will go unremarked or have any visible consequence. Yet this violence is what puts a man at risk of dying violently. In a situation where another man is unwilling to walk away or talk things over, the ensuing argument is likely to result in injury or death of one of the protagonists. As the South African police have said, over 50% of what they call “social fabric-related murders and attempted murders result from arguments which subsequently deteriorate into fights”.

White young men don't die at the same rates as black young men because they have much better protection. They have far more opportunities to achieve culturally successful manhood without resorting to physical violence. And unlike young black men, the socio-economic fabric around young white males does not need as much repairing.