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Adolescents and youth with disabilities in South Africa still lack access to sexual and reproductive health and rights services including comprehensive sexuality education, which may increase their vulnerability to SRHR issues such as HIV and sexual violence. This is exacerbated for learners with intellectual disabilities whose educators often lack skills and tools to accommodate these learners in comprehensive sexuality education lessons. The following paper outlines the findings of a formative evaluation of an innovative sexuality training approach for educators of learners with diverse disabilities (Breaking the Silence approach). This approach was developed and piloted with educators across eight schools for learners with intellectual disabilities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The paper discusses the educators’ understanding and experiences of using this approach. The findings revealed that although educators were able to implement parts of the approach, contextual factors impacted the degree of implementation. These factors were related to perceptions of socio-cultural norms, interpersonal engagement with peers and management, the structural environment of school settings, and the wider community setting. Educators began to address cultural taboos related to talking about sexuality, but were challenged by untrained staff and the larger socio-cultural context, which includes a heighted risk of sexual violence against their learners. The paper concludes with recommendations for a further investigation of the approach within a whole school setting considering the needs of educators to not only acquire skills and knowledge but also to address their larger socio-cultural context in which they have to implement comprehensive sexuality education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A perceived opportunity for improved livelihoods has made Johannesburg a target destination for many internal migrants moving within the borders of South Africa, as well as for cross-border migrants from around the continent and beyond. As a result, many migrants-especially those with irregular documentation-engage in unconventional and sometimes criminalised livelihood strategies, including sex work. This paper uses empirical data from a 2010 mixed methods research study that included a participatory photography project with 11 migrant women from Zimbabwe and elsewhere in South Africa, who sold sex in the migrant-dense suburb of Hillbrow, in inner-city Johannesburg. By focussing on the diverse lived experiences of migrant women who sell sex, this paper examines the ways in which these women survive, engage, and experience their work and the city. Feelings of excitement as a result of new experiences, opportunities for new identities and dreams to be formed, sentiments of nostalgia, concerns and experiences of violence, pride in the ability to survive and earn an income, feelings of loneliness, and negotiations of stigma surfaced throughout the study as participants explained, represented and examined their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that South African youth use silence as a sign of respect and gratitude and to maintain family and kinship bonds. There has not been much research to help us better our understanding of this phenomenon. This paper explores the strategic use of silence in narratives of absent fathers collected from the Mpumalanga province. Twenty-one-hour, one-on-one, fieldworker-respondent, semi structured interviews in their local languages, were conducted with women aged 15-26 years old. Interviews were gender-matched, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and translated into English. Thematic, and some elements of discourse analysis, were used to analyse the data focusing on motivations behind silence in familial relationships. Findings show that motivations for upholding silence within the home were to show respect and gratitude, and avoid upsetting a bothersome mother. The dynamics of silence reported here are similar to those found in narratives of psychological distress and abuse among young South Africans. A novel theme was that of avoiding speaking with a chronically ill mother lest this made her condition worse and recovery difficult. This research suggests a need to equip young women with ways of expressing themselves within families without fear of being seen as disrespectful, ungrateful and a burden to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on participants' views regarding factors contributing to the vulnerability of teenagers with intellectual disability to sexual abuse. The study took place at two special schools located in a village of KwaZulu-Natal. Data were gathered using by individual interviews, which were conducted in a face-to-face manner with life orientation teachers (8), school nurses (2), a clinical psychologist at the local hospital, and social workers (2). The interviews were also conducted with two parents, a traditional healer and spiritual diviner. Data was thematically analysed. The vulnerability factors were grouped into three broad categories, namely: individual, family and community factors. The existence of a number of vulnerability factors suggests that efforts to mitigate the problem should occur at various levels, with which an individual is interacting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Casual and contract employment increased in South African food retailing in the 1990s, opening divisions of labor on shop floors among black workers previously unified. Literature on labor mobilization concentrates on institutional strategies to organize contingent workers. Explaining new segmentation among retail workers, this paper finds that a notion of what it meant to be a “worker” is also relevant for explaining obstacles to mobilization. “Worker” legacies were shaped in the 1980s and carried forward with shifting emphases in the post-apartheid period. These processes reproduced a normative notion of worker as full-time, permanent employee and labor rights as codified in a narrowed employment relationship. Casual and contract workers experienced work as a series of exclusions from rights and respect within the workplace vis-à-vis permanent workers. Contingent workers protested their marginalization by reclaiming their inclusion within workplace relations, within a workplace citizenship. In the process, divisions of labor deepened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a need to Africanise family therapy so as to serve the interest of local communities. Western approaches to family therapy have been accused of being irrelevant to African contexts. They are seen as forming part of a dominant scientific knowledge which invalidates local folk and cultural psychologies and thereby continuing a historical tradition of oppressive colonial power relations. This paper aims at archaeologising and evaluating such criticism by situating family therapy within different fields of knowledge that have emerged historically and are currently co-existing in Africa. The advantages and disadvantages of dominant family therapy approaches in African contexts are explored by focussing on power relations between different knowledges in Africa. It is argued that many global narratives of family therapy offer congenial companionship to many local African narratives, but that family therapists should pay more attention to local spiritual and political narratives so as to attain more legitimacy and validation by local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]