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The book "Introduction to Forensic Psychology and Psycho-Legal Work" edited by Gertie (HG) Pretorius provides a comprehensive guide for professionals and students in the field of psycho-legal work in South Africa. The book covers various topics including the integration of psycho-legal knowledge into professional psychology training, the role of psychologists in the court system, and the importance of expert psychological knowledge in legal contexts. It also offers practical guidance on conducting psycho-legal assessments, ethical considerations, and report writing. The book is structured into three parts, covering different aspects of psycho-legal work, and emphasizes the need for evidence-based decision-making and accountability. While the book could benefit from more guidance on the role of psychologists as fact witnesses, it is a valuable resource for those working or interested in the field of forensic psychology and psycho-legal work in South Africa. [Extracted from the article]

In this study, I explored how haptic modes of sense, contact, and practice affectively shape, become shaped with/in, the erotic experiences of gay fist-fuckers’ fist-play. Unstructured individual interviews were conducted with 9 gay fist-fuckers from South Africa. Theoretically framed by DeleuzoGuattarian-inspired work on sexuality-as-assemblage and Mark Paterson’s concept of feeling-with, a thematic analysis was employed to identify instances where participants’ haptic sites and senses were co-articulated with the erotic experiences of their fist-play. What emerged were four themes of hapto-erotic sense-making in fist-play: feeling-with trust, feeling-with desire, feeling-with care, and feeling-with pleasure. Together, the findings highlight that erotic experiences of fist-play become (trans)formed with/in fluctuating assemblages of desire, communal ethics, repertoires of technique, sense perception, inter-corporeal contact, as well as nonhuman objects and substances that affectively charge and channel haptic sites and senses. The findings point to a queerer and relational sensing and making sense of intimacy, pleasure, and play that is not reliant on phallocentric logics or tropes of gay sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anal fisting has often been caricatured as an aggressive, if not violent, mode of sexual and erotic practice between gay men, circumscribed by discourses of risk, danger, and even death. In this study, I explore how a sample of 28 South African gay men who regularly incorporate anal fisting into their preferred sexual practices construct and understand the experience of intimacy in the practices and relations of their fist-fucking. Through sexual scripting theory and a Thematic Analysis of unstructured individual interviews conducted with participants, the results highlight a scripting of intimacy with/in anal fisting that is grounded on three recurrent and interrelated themes: trust and vulnerability; connection and communication; as well as pleasure and skill. The results of this study draw attention to the ways in which anal fisting is not only experienced as a deeply intimate form of pleasure and lovemaking for its participants, but, moreover, how the construction and understanding of intimacy in fist-fucking is framed as a queer/er mode of anal sex/uality and erotics that defines and constitutes itself in contradistinction to both hetero- and homo-normative scripts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing attention has been directed by South African commuter rights groups towards the incidence of sexual violence experienced by women when commuting in minibus taxis. Against this backdrop, data was collected through a series of unstructured individual interviews with 14 South African women. Putting to work the concept of affective atmosphere, findings revealed that the ways in which these women articulated the threat of sexual violence in minibus taxis was co-produced through shifting taxi↔commuters↔bodies assemblages which not only informed how the threat of sexual violence was experienced, but, also, how their own bodies, men's bodies, and everyday commuting were negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gay men's anal fisting has been rendered in sharply divided terms through cautionary-toned medico-forensic studies or more affirmative queer commentary. Despite these paradigmatic and tonal differences, both have tended to share an analytically narrow humanocentric lens. Drawing data from a project with South African gay men who incorporate fisting into their sexual relations, a posthumanist performative account of temporality is put to work in exploring how anal fisting entails the co-participation of the often unacknowledged agency/ies of time. What emerges through this analysis is a peculiar and queer(er) temporality of slowtime which actively co-produces the corpo-erotics of gay men's fisting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigated the relationship between traditional masculine ideology, body image discrepancy, self-esteem, and the pursuit of muscularity in a sample of school going boys. Constructs were measured [...]

Although the study of masculinity/ies in South Africa has been a point of academic interest, especially since the fall of apartheid; there has been little focus on masculinity/ies peculiar to the South African military establishment. Where there has been, this has focused on the army environment and adopted a smaller-scale qualitative approach. In contrast, this study focuses on the South African Navy. The study provides a brief report of findings from the administration of a traditional masculine ideology scale with 1,185 South African navy men, between 19 and 59 years of age (mean of 25 years). Descriptive statistics, a multiple regression analysis, one-sample t -test, and one-way analysis of variance were run to analyze the data. Results demonstrated that this sample of navy men significantly endorsed constructs of self-sufficiency, physical toughness, and emotional restrictedness, as dimensions of traditional masculine ideology. Avoidance of femininity and risk-taking were not significantly endorsed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: A recent article reported on common mental health conditions among recreational scuba divers, and observed that the prevalence mirrored national population figures. This raised the question of the extent to which this might also be the case among professional divers. No data on commercial divers could be located; this paper presents the situation among navy divers. Methods: Mental health survey data from 132 South African Navy divers were reviewed to describe the 12-month prevalence of common mood, anxiety, and alcohol misuse disorders. Results: Prevalence of common mood and anxiety conditions appeared to reflect local general population estimates, and the occurrence of alcohol misuse was higher than local population figures, although the usefulness of the population data could be challenged. Conclusions: It appeared that common mental health conditions in both sport and navy divers may generally conform to their respective local general population estimates. If this were to be the case in the broader professional diving environment as well, the inclusion of some form of formal mental health screening during commercial diving medical examinations may be beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anal fisting among gay men, that is, the sexual(ised) and erotic (single or partnered) practice of inserting the hand(s) and/or forearm(s) into the anus and rectum, has historically been framed in medical and medico-forensic case studies as a violent and dangerous sexual practice associated with the contraction of disease, heightened risk of sexual injury, and the possibility of death. In contrast to this, pro-Queer scholars of gender and sexuality have conceptually reframed the act of anal fisting among gay men as a subversive sexual practice which in its discursive and material performances radically transgresses the heteronormative tropes which typically underwrite human sex/uality, especially in ways that render the preferred representations of (gay) sex as 'vanilla'. By drawing from unstructured individual interviews with a sample of eight (self-identifying) South African gay men who regularly incorporate anal fisting into their sexual relations, this study explores the gendered contradictions which rhetorically circumscribe how these men discursively construct and experience the corpo-erotic practice of anal fisting. In doing so, the findings highlight that while anal fisting among gay men may in fact engender shades of a sexually subversive practice by the way it radically (re)makes the material and erotic possibilities and connections of gay men's bodies in exceptionally non-normative and perhaps Queer ways; it is, at the same time, also invested with, and reiterative of, discursive repertoires which actively recuperate heteronormative as well as heteromasculinist tropes and gendered power relations that, in some instances, appear femiphobic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]