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Abstract
This paper examines young South African school children’s understanding of HIV/AIDS. Based on ethnographic work in two schools in Greater Durban, it explores the impact of HIV/AIDS on the ways in which gender and sexuality are articulated against the backdrop of race and class specific contexts. The first part of the paper examines the children’s discourses of sex, sexuality and HIV/AIDS. We show that young children’s meanings of sex, sexuality and are not straightforward and are actively produced and defined through a range of social processes. These processes shape the extent to which young children experience sexuality within discourses of fear and pleasure. Young children’s meanings of HIV/AIDS are explored in the second part of the paper. Here we show how their knowledge of HIV/AIDS is socially structured through class/race and gender and these forms of social relations provide the framing and reference points for children’s constructions of meanings around HIV/AIDS. We finish the paper by raising some theoretical and practical/political questions about the implications of what we have found for HIV/AIDS education in South Africa.
Acknowledgements
This paper was first presented at the Pleasure and Danger Revisited: Sexualities in the Twenty‐first Century Conference at Cardiff University in 2004. We would like to thank the people who came to our session for the valuable feedback that gave us. We would also like to thank our colleagues on this research project for their invaluable support and exchange of ideas and, particularly, Relebohile Moletsane and Robert Morrell for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of the paper.
Notes
1. Indians form a very small proportion of the South African population as a whole (less than 3%).
2. This confirms earlier studies (Whiteside & Sunter, Citation2000; Barnett & Whiteside, Citation2002; Nelson Mandela Foundation & HSRC, Citation2002).
3. ‘Informal settlement’ is the term used in South Africa to describe the large, sprawling shanty towns that grew up during apartheid where Black migrant workers from rural areas and sometimes other countries, could set up home, albeit illegally.
4. Under apartheid the population of South Africa was divided into ‘African’ (Black people), ‘European’ (White people), ‘Indian’ (with family origins in the Indian subcontinent) and ‘Coloured’ (people of ‘mixed’ ancestry). While there is no longer racial classification in terms of citizenship and rights, the use of these categories, in every day parlance, news reportage and academic writing, has continued because of the ways in which they mark the South African landscape and make significant differences to people’s life chances and lived experiences.
5. All names used in the paper have been altered to preserve anonymity.
6. The HSRC/Mandela study (2004) found that three percent of children between the ages of 12‐ and 18‐years headed their households with responsibilities for physical and emotional care and financial support of their families including both younger children and older, ill parents or grandparents.
7. See Oliviera (Citation2000) for a consideration of the impact of translation (even when done by the researcher herself); see Hoffman (Citation1990) for an autobiographical account of the impact of moving from one language to another.
8. In this interview and most of those conducted at KwaDabeka, Deevia is speaking to the children through an interpreter.
9. Thabi and Pindile are girls. Sithole and Sihle are boy.
