Browsing by Author "Kahn, Lauren"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Experiences of HIV/AIDS diagnosis, disclosure and stigma in an urban informal settlement in the Cape Peninsula: A qualitative exploration
    (2004) Kahn, Lauren
    This paper explores the personal experiences of five HIV positive individuals situated in an urban, informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa. In-depth interviews and a focus group were conducted and analysed to facilitate an integrated understanding of how individual and social processes intersect and shape experiences of HIV positive individuals. Specifically, experiences of diagnosis, disclosure and stigma are investigated, and explored as they play out in the context of the family, the peer group, intimate (sexual) relationships, and within the broader community context.
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    Growing up in the new South Africa: childhood and adolescence in post-apartheid Cape Town
    (2011) Bray, Rachel; Gooskens, Imke; Moses, Sue; Kahn, Lauren; Seekings, Jeremy
    How has the end of apartheid affected the experiences of South African children and adolescents? This pioneering study provides a compelling account of the realities of everyday life for the first generation of children and adolescents growing up in a democratic South Africa. The authors examine the lives of young people across historically divided communities at home, in the neighbourhoods where they live, and at school. This resource can be used be anyone interested in developing their knowledge on the experiences of children in post-apartheid South Africa.
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    Narratives of sexual abstinence: A qualitative study of female adolescents in a Cape Town community
    (2005) Kahn, Lauren
    Abstinence from sexual intercourse is the ‘A’ in the ‘ABC’ of mainstream interventions to address HIV/AIDS in South Africa. These interventions have been informed by social cognitive mode ls of sexual behaviour that emphasise the individual while neglecting the social context, and emphasise what the individual knows about long- term biomedical consequences while ignoring more immediate psychosocial factors on individual decision-making. The paper draws upon critical health psychology to explore decision-making around sexual abstinence among adolescent girls in Ocean View, a poor, ‘coloured’ neighbourhood in Cape Town. These girls ‘deviate’ from the norm in that they have chosen sexual abstinence in a context characterised by high levels of adolescent promiscuity. Their sexual decision-making is found to be a means whereby the participants attempt to challenge and counter destructive sexual norms operating within their community. Abstinence might be seen as part of a broader strategy of making and taking opportunities to escape from the destructive cycles of life in Ocean View. These concerns are both instrumental (in that sex has real consequences) and symbolic (in that abstaining from sex represents a more general approach to independence, self-control and relationships with others). This form of reaction against prevailing norms appeared more likely if a girl has some sources of support, such as a stable and loving home environment. However, in deviating from the norm, the girls are often targets of resentment by their sexually active peers, and have to deal with social isolation and exclusion. Sexual health concerns do not figure in these girls’ accounts of their sexual decision -making. This paper finds that sexual decision-making is informed more by the psychosocial and material context than by cognitive factors; in this sense, HIV/AIDS interventions based upon educating adolescents about sexual health are unlikely to have a significant effect upon sexual decision-making and behaviour.
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    Narratives of sexual abstinence: A qualitative study of female adolescents in a Cape Town community
    (University of Cape Town, 2006) Kahn, Lauren
    Abstinence from sexual intercourse is the ‘A’ in the ‘ABC’ of mainstream interventions to address HIV/AIDS in South Africa. These interventions have been informed by social cognitive mode ls of sexual behaviour that emphasise the individual while neglecting the social context, and emphasise what the individual knows about long- term biomedical consequences while ignoring more immediate psychosocial factors on individual decision-making. The paper draws upon critical health psychology to explore decision-making around sexual abstinence among adolescent girls in Ocean View, a poor, ‘coloured’ neighbourhood in Cape Town. These girls ‘deviate’ from the norm in that they have chosen sexual abstinence in a context characterised by high levels of adolescent promiscuity. Their sexual decision-making is found to be a means whereby the participants attempt to challenge and counter destructive sexual norms operating within their community. Abstinence might be seen as part of a broader strategy of making and taking opportunities to escape from the destructive cycles of life in Ocean View. These concerns are both instrumental (in that sex has real consequences) and symbolic (in that abstaining from sex represents a more general approach to independence, self-control and relationships with others). This form of reaction against prevailing norms appeared more likely if a girl has some sources of support, such as a stable and loving home environment. However, in deviating from the norm, the girls are often targets of resentment by their sexually active peers, and have to deal with social isolation and exclusion. Sexual health concerns do not figure in these girls’ accounts of their sexual decision -making. This paper finds that sexual decision-making is informed more by the psychosocial and material context than by cognitive factors; in this sense, HIV/AIDS interventions based upon educating adolescents about sexual health are unlikely to have a significant effect upon sexual decision-making and behaviour.
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    Playing the 'love game': Sexual decision-making amongst African girls in a Cape Town community
    (2007) Kahn, Lauren
    Drawing upon critical health and discursive psychology, the study explores the sexual decision-making of 8 sexually-active high school girls, aged 17 to 19 years, living in Masiphumelele, a poor African community in Cape Town, South African. The girls participated in a focus group and 1-2 individual, semi-structured interview/s. The paper describes and explores, firstly, the ideals girls uphold surrounding sexual relationships, on the one hand, and the normative character of sexual relationships as these typically play out in practice, stressing the dissonance between the two. The paper highlights the part that boys and girls play in reproducing a problematic sexual culture that supports sexual relationships that are antithetical to girls' ideals, and the processes that mediate sexual conformity. Following this, the paper turns to explore the participants' sexual decision-making and relationships. Three broad sexual strategies are isolated. The paper explores the rationale driving the respective strategies, the extent to which these strategies produce relationships that conform to, or, alternatively, diverge from and counter the norm, and the factors and processes mediating this. Finally, the paper explores and highlights the role of relationships beyond the sexual arena in mediating girls' sexual decision-making, and how these are implicated in reproducing problematic sexual norms and relationships. The study finds that the barriers to girls establishing and sustaining sexual relationships that promote emotional and physical health and well-being are deeply embedded within aspects of the psychosocial and material environment. Promoting the emotional and physical health and well-being of girls within their sexual relationships requires recognising and addressing problematic elements within their broader relational environments, and providing supportive, advisory figures and contexts, as well as positive role models.
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    Sexual abstinence: A qualitative study of White, English-speaking girls in a Cape Town community
    (2007) Kahn, Lauren
    This paper explores decision-making around sexual abstinence among white, English-speaking adolescent girls in Fish Hoek, a middle-class neighbourhood in Cape Town, South Africa. The girls participated in a focus group and 1-2 individual, semi-structured interview/s. Sexual abstinence is found to be a strategy geared towards promoting emotional and relational well-being, rather than primarily geared towards promoting physical health and well-being. Decision-making around sexual abstinence is found to be value-laden, bound up in the meaning and value the participants attach to sex and sexual relationships, values and ideology surrounding marriage, as well as religious values and moral codes. Adolescent sexual decision-making is found to be socially mediated by dominant peer group sexual norms which value sexual promiscuity over sexual abstinence. Pressure to conform to dominant sexual norms and practices is found to be part of a nexus of social pressures facing young people more generally. Supportive family environments and relationships with affirming peers are found to play a pivotal role in sustaining counter-normative strategies such as sexual abstinence. Problematically, girls who engage in counter-normative sexual strategies such as abstinence experience ambivalence and insecurities which can feed into and reproduce sexual norms which devalue abstinence. Furthermore, counter-normative sexual strategies are underpinned by, and reproduce, other problematic hegemonic sexual discourses. Designing interventions that are geared towards sustaining positive sexual decision-making, and 'safe' sexual practices in the long-term, and not solely towards changing 'risky' sexual practices, is recommended.
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    Sexual subjects : a feminist post-structuralist analysis of female adolescent sexual subjectivity and agency
    (2008) Kahn, Lauren; Foster, Don
    Research and intervention into female adolescent sexual health in the context of HIV/AIDS have been dominated by individualistic, cognitive perspectives, which present sexuality as a site of rational, individual choice and agency. A paradigm shift has occurred in recent years, advanced with the realisation that decision-making around sexual health is not driven by rational reasoning alone but, rather, is complexly intertwined with social/discursive constructions of gender and sexuality which, in turn, are enmeshed with processes of signification and relations of power. Drawing upon feminist, post-structuralist and discourse analytic theoretical, methodological and analytical frames, the study focuses on the discourses available to young women for making meaning out of their experiences with their bodies, their relationships and sexual choices, and explores how gendered constructions of (female adolescent) sexuality alternatively enable or undermine adolescent girls' sexual health.