Browsing by Subject "Cape Town community"

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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.