With contributions from leading legal and policy researchers, clinical practitioners and child development specialists in southern Africa, this volume is an invitation to reflect on the many-sided nature of sexual abuse of young children. Many of the contributors propose effective ways to prevent abuse or improve care and services for the many affected children and their families. The book is in five parts. The opening section confronts the realities of sexual abuse of pre-pubertal children and the way abuse is represented in the press. The second section discusses the individual and socio-cultural causes of child sexual abuse. Section three covers legal and policy responses to the problem, while the fourth section presents a series of accounts of interventions on behalf of abused children drawn from South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The book concludes with some critical reflections on research in this area.

The National Household HIV Prevalence and Risk Survey of South African Children forms part of the Nelson Mandela/HSRC Study of HIV/AIDS: South African National HIV Prevalence, Behavioural Risks and Mass Media Household Survey 2002. This report provides information on HIV prevalence, orphanhood, risk factors for HIV infection and knowledge of HIV/AIDS among South African children. A total of 3 988 children aged 2 to 18 years participated in the survey. Caregivers of 2 138 children 2 to 11 years of of age answered a questionnaire on the child's behalf. A total of 740 children 12 to 14 years of age directly answered a separate questionnaire. An additional 1 110 children and between 15 and 18 years of age answered a youth questionnaire. Of the 3 988 children, 3 294 (82.6 per cent) provided a saliva specimen for HIV testing. The results show HIV prevalence among children 2 to 18 years of age to be 5.4 per cent. Prevalence was nearly constant across age groups and did not vary significantly. There were insufficient numbers to compare prevalence across race groups. The prevalence was higher than expected. Further studies are necessary to verify this finding.

Much has happened since the first appearance of AIDS in 1981: it has been identified, studied, and occasionally denied. The virus has shifted host populations and spread globally. Medicine, the social sciences, and world governments have joined forces to combat and prevent the disease. And South Africa has emerged as ground zero for the pandemic. The editors of HIV/AIDS in South Africa 25 Years On present the South African crisis as a template for addressing the myriad issues surrounding the epidemic worldwide, as the book brings together a widely scattered body of literature, analyzes psychosocial and sexual aspects contributing to HIV transmission and prevention, and delves into complex intersections of race, gender, class, and politics. Including largely overlooked populations and issues (e.g., prisoners, persons with disabilities, stigma), as well as challenges shaping future research and policy, the contributors approach their topics with rare depth, meticulous research, carefully drawn conclusions, and profound compassion. Among the topics covered: The relationship between HIV and poverty, starting from the question, "Which is the determinant and which is the consequence?" Epidemiology of HIV among women and men: concepts of femininity and masculinity, and gender inequities as they affect HIV risk; gender-specific prevention and intervention strategies. The impact of AIDS on infants and young children: risk and protective factors; care of children by HIV-positive mothers; HIV-infected children. Current prevention and treatment projects, including local-level responses, community-based work, and VCT (voluntary counseling and testing) programs. New directions: promoting circumcision, vaccine trials, "positive prevention." South Africa’s history of AIDS denialism. The urgent lessons in this book apply both globally and locally, making HIV/AIDS in South Africa 25 Years On uniquely instructive and useful for professionals working in HIV/AIDS and global public health.

This book presents and brings together research on child sexual abuse from various countries and cultures in the Arab Region. It addresses the multiple types of Child Sexual Abuse Exploitation and Trafficking (CSAET) and responds to the expanding burden of its diverse presentations. The book identifies appropriate structures for efficient programs that are to be accepted and developed by diverse cultures in the region, in order to develop an action plan to combat sexual violence against children. It studies the gathered to date child sexual abuse protection systems in the Arab region, covering issues such as children’s rights, challenges of protection and advocates for peaceful, safe, healthy and happy environments for children and their families.

This book examines the experiences of 49 second-generation exiles from South Africa. Using “generation” as an analytical concept, it investigates the relational, temporal and embodied nature of their childhoods in terms of kinship relations, life cycle, cohort development and memory-making. It reveals how child agents exploited the liminal nature of exile to negotiate their sense of identity, home and belonging, while also struggling over their position and power in formal Politics and informal politics of the everyday. It also reflects upon their political consciousness, identity and sense of civic duty on return to post-apartheid South Africa, and how this has led to the emergence of the Masupatsela generational cohort concerned with driving social and political change in South Africa.

Child sexual abuse is a multifaceted event, interpreted in many different ways, in many different contexts. In New Feminist Stories of Child Sexual Abuse, contributors try to untangle some of the complex ways in which stories of child sexual abuse are translated through and into personal, professional and social politics. The first section of the book explores the cultural and political landscape of child sexual abuse in Western and non-Western contexts. It examines the ways in which radical aspects of feminism can be undermined in Western cultures and how Westernised ideologies of childhood, sex and gender have been used to structure discussions about child sexual abuse across the world. The second section traces the effects of these wider cultural and political narratives through the various contexts in which child sexual abuse is theorised and around which interventions in the lives of women are structured. It provides insights into how traditional approaches to understanding harm can be challenged and reworked in practice, using alternative therapeutic models based on feminist post-structuralist agendas. Reworking earlier feminist analyses, New Feminist Stories of Child Sexual Abuse asks pertinent questions about how child sexual abuse is produced, rather than merely represented, in the ways we speak about it.

Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive: Towards a Transformative Psychosocial Praxis draws on a psychosocial approach that is uniquely suited to the socio-historical and psychical analysis of racism. The book relies mainly on the memories, stories and narratives of ordinary people living in apartheid South Africa.

Issues Around Aligning Theory, Research and Practice in Social Work Education provides a reflection on social work education with a slant towards an Afrocentric approach, aiming to facilitate strong reflective thinking and to address local realities about social work education on the African continent as well as in broader global contexts. This volume focuses on issues around aligning theory, research and practice in social work education. A significant contribution is made here to the scholarly understanding of opportunities to sustain the academic discourse on social work education. Social work as a profession and a social science discipline is dynamic, and it ought to meet the challenges of the realities of the societies in which it serves, given the history of the changing society of South Africa from apartheid to democracy. Over the years, social work education and training has undergone tremendous curricular changes with the enactment of the White Paper for Social Welfare and the national review, respectively, by the South African Council for Social Services Professions (SACSSP) and the Council on Higher Education (CHE) for the re-accreditation of all Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) programmes in South Africa fulfilling the prescripts of the Higher Education Act (No. 101 of 1997, as amended) and Social Service Professions Act (No. 110 of 1978). It is worth mentioning that the curricular changes will also continue with the current reviewing of Social Service Professions Act (No. 110 of 1978), as amended, which is underway in South Africa. This book is really ground-breaking! The Afrocentric perspective on social work practice contributes to the current discourse on decolonisation of social work teaching and practice. From a methodological perspective, the book is premised on multi-, inter- and trans-disciplining in social sciences. It covers aspects of social work education and practice through research (narrative, qualitative, African methodology, secondary data analysis, etc.), engendering values and ethics, report writing, supervision in fieldwork as well as exchange programmes and international service-learning, addressing a number of concepts such as cultural competency, cultural awareness and sensitivity are addressed.

Accurate statistics on the prevalence of child and adolescent sexual abuse are difficult to collect because of problems of underreporting and the lack of one definition of what constitutes such abuse. However, there is general agreement among mental health and child protection professionals that child sexual abuse is not uncommon and is a serious problem which has become more widely spread with the internet. This new book presents recent and significant research from around the globe.

This second edition of the book provides up-to-date information on new drugs, new proven HIV prevention interventions, a new chapter on positive prevention, and current HIV epidemiology. This definitive text covers all aspects of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, from basic science to medicine, sociology, economics and politics. It has been written by a highly respected team of South African HIV/AIDS experts and provides a thoroughly researched account of the epidemic in the region.