By Keith Ross
South Africa's history of violence and its ongoing social ills have left many people emotionally scarred and some of them – now emotionally blunted – have turned to crime.
Many are socially skewed and now see violence as an acceptable way of achieving their objectives. This is the view of a panel of experts who took part in SAfm Radio's discussion programme, the After Eight Debate, on the factors contributing to South Africa's violent crime.
The panel felt there were some factors South Africa had in common with high crime areas overseas, but there were others specific to this country.
One of these specifics was "our long history of conflict and internal strife, where the majority of people were victims of apartheid, especially in the period 1950 to 1994", said panel member Professor Beaty Naude, a criminologist at the University of South Africa.
"Many young people were drawn into violence and they were socialised to find violence acceptable as a means to obtain their objectives or to intimidate people," she said.
Naude said young people who witnessed such violence or participated in it were emotionally blunted and scarred.
She said violence in the apartheid years was justified by the state, communities and liberation movements. "This blunted perceptions of what is legal and illegal behaviour in South Africa. Many of those young people are now parents and have the difficult task to socialise children in a new political era. Attitudes … cannot be changed overnight."
Naude said recent research done in Johannesburg showed many young people had skewed value systems. The research found:
- 28 percent of young people said violence was acceptable as a way to get what they wanted.
- 25 percent said it was acceptable for a man to hit his girlfriend.
- 30 percent said it was "okay" for poor people to steal from the rich.
"Globally most crimes are committed by young males, 80 percent by those under the age of 25," she said. Among the South African population, 54 percent were under 25.
"In many African countries firearms are in circulation as a result of the civil wars and other conflicts. These factors all contribute to the violent behaviour in South Africa."
But Naude said about 80 percent of all violent crimes involved offenders and victims who knew each other. Only about 20 percent involved strangers. She said that internationally, victim surveys in more than 40 countries had shown violence was involved in 13 to 23 percent of all crimes. "In South Africa about 23 percent of our crimes are violent."
But comparisons were not easy, said a second member of the panel, David Bruce, senior researcher at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
"It is not entirely clear if South Africa has exceptionally high levels of violence compared to societies like Brazil or, for instance, Colombia. We do have high levels of violence, but there are other such societies – it seems they are societies – like South Africa, characterised by high levels of inequality," he said.
Callous
Bruce said it was difficult to judge the perception that South African criminals used more violence than may be "necessary", or were particularly callous or cruel. He said the evidence suggested countries like Brazil and El Salvador had comparable levels of violence in terms of homicide statistics.
A third member of the panel, Zane Halle, a former offender who is now a community worker for Khulisa Services, agreed that many people in South Africa had been emotionally scarred in the past.
"A lot of people continue to be scarred," he said. "We have got a lot of child-headed households… Those kids grow up emotionally scarred and they start finding a way of getting back at society for the raw deal they have had."
In IOL.
CSVR is a multi-disciplinary institute that seeks to understand and prevent violence, heal its effects and build sustainable peace at the community, national and regional levels.
