Bridging risk and enactment: the role of psychology in leading psychosocial research to augment the public health approach to violence in South Africa

Abstract

In the wake of apartheid, many in the South African health and social sciences shifted their orientation to understanding violence. Rather than approaching violence as a criminal problem, post-apartheid scholarship surfaced violence as a threat to national health. This re-orientation was well aligned with a global groundswell that culminated in the World Health Assembly’s 1996 declaration of violence as a public health problem. In response, researchers and other stakeholders have committed to the public health approach to violence in South Africa. Despite some unquestionable successes in applying this approach, violence remains a critical social issue and its recalcitrantly high rates signal that there is still much work to be done. One avenue for more focussed research concerns understanding the mechanisms by which upstream risk factors for violence are translated into actual enactments. We argue that South African psychology is well placed to provide greater resolution to this focus. We begin by providing a brief overview of the public health approach to violence. We then point to three specific areas in which the limits to our understanding of the way that downstream psychological and upstream social risk factors converge in situations of violence, compromise the theoretical and prevention traction promised by this approach and chart several basic psychosocial research coordinates for South African psychology. Steering future studies of violence by these coordinates would go some way to addressing these limits and, in so doing, extend on the substantial gains already yielded by the public health approach to violence in South Africa.

Beyond surveys and scales: How rape myths manifest in sexual assault police records.

“…This research should also examine the extent to which the different types of statements mediate the influence of victim and suspect characteristics on case progression. Though an existing body of research has identified specific characteristics of the victim and suspect that impact case progression (e.g., Campbell, Greeson, Bybee, & Fehler-Cabral, 2012; Shaw & Campbell, 2013; Spohn & Tellis, 2012), Hamby (2015) argued that variables such as victim or suspect race are not causes in and of themselves on our outcomes of interest (see also Bowman, Stevens, Eagle, & Matzopoulos, 2015). Rather, they are “marker[s] for some unknown set of processes that have the actual causal impact” (Hamby, 2015, p. 3).…”

Theorising community rage for decolonial action

“…I draw on affect theory to advance an approach that takes rage seriously. I offer that while South African psychological research offers important insights, this scholarship is generally interested in violence and not rage (e.g., Bowman, Stevens, Eagle and Matzopoulos, 2015). Finally, while recognising the value of community psychology in elevating the community as the unit of analysis, I contend that the next frontier of engagement is to centre rage as related to violence but as a distinct subjective and systemic feature of life within contexts of ongoing oppression.…”

‘Health psychology’ or ‘psychology for health’? A history of psychologists’ engagement with health in South Africa

“…Under Apartheid, psychologists tended to reject the pathologization of violence as an individual trait, focusing instead on its social dimensions and historical roots in patriarchy, colonialism and dispossession. Along the way, some have argued that this focus has omitted the individual and interpersonal dimensions of violence (Campbell, 1992) and more recently, there have been calls to refocus research on how ‘risk factors for violence are translated into actual enactments’ (Bowman et al, 2015b: 279), a task requiring a ‘psychosocial’ understanding of how context and human subjectivity culminate in violent events. Others have argued that the public health approach has led to the foreclosure of a broader, historical understanding of violence and a ‘preoccupation with interventionism … seeking solutions without necessarily understanding the phenomenon’ (Stevens, 2015: 9).…”