Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Gender-based Violence in South African higher education: males’ contestations, voice and responsibility
Juliet Ramohai, Rhoda Patrick
ABSTRACT:
Higher education South Africa has been plagued with incidences of Gender-based violence (GBV) for many years. Statistics in this area indicate that ten percent of all reported incidences of GBV nationally come from higher education institutions. Despite policies and interventions from the department of higher education and training and institution-based initiatives, this scourge continues to ravage the higher education community. Women and gender nonconforming groups have been reported to be the groups most affected by GBV. It is not surprising that men, who in most reported cases are the perpetrators, bear the brunt of blame for the ever-increasing cases. For this reason, there has been calls for women to speak up and report the cases. Invitations have also been extended to every member of the community to speak up against GBV. In heeding this call, the authors of this paper initiated a participatory action research and action learning (PALAR) project which challenged first year male students in one higher education institution in South Africa, to raise their voice and take action towards the prevention of GBV in this institution. The current paper reports on two initial seminars which formed part of this project, in which round table discussions were held with first year male students and different internal and external stakeholders to deliberate on the concepts of GBV and discuss working strategies towards the eradication of GBV in the institution. The authors drew on Paulo Freire’s critical conscientization as they framed points of discussion for these critical conversations. Emerging from these two workshops are male contestations pertaining to the definition of GBV as a concept and critical questions of voice and responsibility as reported in this paper.
keywords: Participatory action research, action learning, voice, gender-based violence