Using Drawing to Examine Sexual Violence With Orphaned Learners in a South African Township School

• In Event: Engaging Young People Through the Arts and Visual Practices to Address Sexual Violence

Abstract

Objectives: In this paper we examine the use of drawing in unearthing the voices of orphans at a township secondary school near Durban, South Africa. The study examined their vulnerability to sexual violence, and how this might help us develop interventions for addressing it. We illustrate how the boys and girls identify, understand and respond to sexual violence, particularly how they resist and challenge such violence.
Theoretical Framework: Our analysis in this study is located within transformative pedagogy and the ‘capacity to aspire’ frameworks. Rooted in Paulo Freire’s (1970) work, transformative pedagogy stresses mutual learning between the educator/researcher and the student/participant (Meyers 2008; Harrell-Levy and Kerpelman 2010) to examine their experiences, and to build critical understanding and to facilitate engagement and use the knowledge to effect change. To facilitate action, particularly in addressing sexual violence in and around the school, Appadurai’s (2004) we used the notion of the ‘capacity to aspire’. Children in schools experience many forms of violence, including sexual violence (Gevers and Flisher, 2012). This capacity to aspire’ can provide the base from which they aspire to change and to use their voice to facilitate a safe learning/living environment.

Methods and data sources: Our study used a workshop approach to generate –through the use of participatory drawing (Mitchell et al, 2011), participants’ representations of sexual violence in and around the school. Using the prompt: Draw what sexual violence looks like in your school and community, the participants used their drawings to describe their experiences. Our analysis was influenced by John Fiske’s (1994) work, which advances the idea of three sites of production, including the image (drawing) as the primary text, what the producers (of the drawing) say about their images and how they experienced making them as the production text, and what the audience (those who come to see the images) say about them as the audience text. We then conducted a thematic analysis of all the material collected, including the audiotapes of the various audience discussions of the productions.

Findings: Using participatory drawing, the learners presented what we refer to as “journeying into their thoughts”. In so doing, they allowed us, through their images, to see what they knew and thought regarding sexual violence both as victims and/or witnesses. Drawing became an important tool for communicating and making visible their often hidden experiences. Significantly, illustrating the difficulty of speaking about sexual violence, a topic that is largely taboo in this community and is often silenced, the drawings presented sexual violence using metaphors of pain, fear and vulnerability.

Scholarly significance of study: The transformative potential of arts-based methods such as drawings includes enabling our participants (orphans), a group that is often marginalized, to explore a topic that is often difficult to talk about (sexual violence). The use of drawing has deepened our understanding of orphans’ vulnerability to sexual violence in this context. This has implications for how researchers and practitioners might engage vulnerable populations in exploring difficult issues and findings solutions to address them.

Authors

• Ndumiso Ngidi, University of KwaZulu-Natal

• Relebohile Moletsane, University of KwaZulu-Natal