An Exploration of Public Attitudes Toward LGBTI Rights in the Gauteng City-Region of South Africa

ABSTRACT

South Africa’s legal framework on the rights of sexual minorities is one of the most progressive in the world. Despite this, discrimination and violence against gay and lesbian people continues to be a challenge. Using large-scale survey data gathered in the Gauteng City-Region, this study examines public attitudes related to homosexuality. Most respondents to the survey felt that sexual minorities should have equal rights. However, a considerable proportion of respondents also held negative views toward gay and lesbian individuals, with close to two fifths of respondents believing that homosexuality is against the values of their community, and over 12% of participants holding the view that it is acceptable to be violent toward gays and lesbians. Further analysis also consists of an examination of responses cross-tabulated with the variables of race, gender, age, and education, revealing that younger, well-educated South Africans tend to be the most tolerant, but also exhibiting large variances in attitudes within groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Age
• education
• Gauteng City-Region
• gender
• human rights
• public opinion
• race
• South Africa

Notes

^1. The term corrective rape refers to sexual assault of lesbian women and gay men, purportedly as a means of rectifying their sexual orientation or gender identity.

^2. South Africa maintains racial categories inherited from the apartheid system of classification, with the population broadly classed into one of four categories, namely White, Black, Indian (sometimes referred to as Asian), and colored. The latter refers to persons of mixed race, as well as the descendants of some indigenous peoples and those of slaves from Southeast Asia, commonly referred to as Malays. For more information on racial classification in South Africa, see Sibanda, Zuberi, and Udjo (2005).

^3. The province’s 508 wards were divided into Small Area Layers (SALs) to achieve an even distribution of respondents across wards. Wards were the survey’s Primary Survey Unit (PSU), and the portion of population distributed to each SAL was done in proportion to SAL size. 507 of the province’s 508 wards sampled with a minimal threshold of 30 responses, while all wards in metropolitan municipalities sampled with a minimum of 60 responses per ward. Fieldworkers who used a dice method to select stands and dwellings for interviews randomly chose respondents. In all cases, respondents over 18 years old were interviewed.

^4. As an initial baseline study, constrained by the format of the survey results, this research cannot interrogate deeply the complex in-group dynamics, which no doubt would be strengthened and developed by qualitative insights.