Love hurts: Cheating and violence in teenage women's talk of boyfriends

abstract

Teenage love is embedded in ideologies of gender and routine practices of subordination which produce gender inequalities. This Perspective examines the importance the local constructions of gender and the ideologies of love as expressed by young coloured working-class teenage women in Wentworth. Focus group interviews with six participants aged 16–17 years old, and from a predominantly coloured community in Durban, demonstrated the ways in which love and desire interlock with social circumstances. From the data it was evident that whilst there are young women who are complicit in accepting gender inequalities, there is also an emergence of young coloured teenagers with agency, rejecting male dominance. Teenage girls who reject abusive partners, exercise agency and choice, even though they run the risk of losing their boyfriends in the process. There is a need in the South African context to study young teenage women, in specific contexts to understand their relationships, loves, struggles and their vulnerabilities and thus through research, empower young women to resist the gender inequalities that lead to violence and HIV infection. This Perspective seeks to highlight the importance of research in working-class contexts with young women to inform gender violence intervention programmes.

Keywords:

• Boyfriends
• violence
• inequality
• poverty
• sexuality

Acknowledgements

I thank my supervisor, Professor Deevia Bhana for her support and mentoring during the writing and the development of this paper.

This material is based upon work supported financially by the National Research Foundation. Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto