Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The following dissertation explores the experience and representations of child abandonment \nin urban Johannesburg, South Africa. I examine this complex social behaviour through a \nnumber of perspectives specifically: how it is portrayed in the media; how it is represented \nand managed by child protection officers; the lived experience of the abandoning mother and \nthe abandoned child; and finally how it is understood in the context of Western biomedical \nprinciples and those of indigenous African ancestral beliefs. I suggest that child \nabandonment has been individualised and medicalised in South Africa. Individualised, in \nthat it has been termed a problem that falls entirely within the domain of poor women, and \nfrequently that these women are young teenagers. Medicalised in that a social behaviour that \nis not new, is increasingly being defined in medical terms through the portrayal and labelling \nof the abandoning mother as emotionally unstable and criminally insane. I argue that this has \nbeen done in an attempt to motivate for stricter surveillance and control over women’s sexual \nreproductive health and to divert attention from the state’s role in addressing this growing \nsocial challenge.
Author: Deirdre Elizabeth Blackie
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2225660063