Violence in a South African township : preliminary study

M.A. (Clinical Psychology)According to Dell (1989) violence is a strikingly lineal concept that is difficult to address from a systemic perspective. Regardless of this fact, violence is also operative in large systems and is part of society's predicaments. Violence exacts an enormous social cost which is concerned with the loss of self respect in both the perpetrators and the victims as well as the family and the broader social community (Nell & Butchart, 1989). Exploring how people construct and explain violence and how this affects them is the focus of this study. In addition the study will explore the victims' views on intervention strategies to be implemented to reduce this violence. In short, this is to bring together theoretical knowledge and people's common sense ideas. For the purpose of this study, open-ended interviews which were tape-recorded and conducted in the respondents' own language were employed for the purpose of information gathering. The tape recordings were then transcribed and translated in terms of Meyer's (1989) causal construct in psychology as well clustering similar themes that emerged-under different headings. The findings of this study will show that the subjects explained violence in terms of external causes and their ideas about how to prevent violence were concerned with violence at a political level rather than interpersonal level