The State of/and Childhood: Engendering Adolescence in Contemporary South Africa
The State of/and Childhood: Engendering Adolescence in Contemporary South Africa
This chapter argues that South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has played a complicit role in the use of children as instruments of post-apartheid nation-building, and places this instrumentalism in the context of the profound narrativisation of youth that makes them helpless and innocent victims of the apartheid state. The spectacular conceptualisation of youth as victims fails to account for youth themselves as perpetrators of violence. The chapter first provides an overview of the culture of child abuse in contemporary South Africa and the relations between metaphorical and actual violence in childhood abuse. It then examines how childhood and adolescence were conceptualised during the struggle against apartheid and the tendency to ignore the impact of gendered expectations on children's development through adolescence to adulthood.
Keywords: South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation, children, apartheid, violence, child abuse, adolescence
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