Political violence of the unenfranchised for social or personal liberation

[摘要] The study focused on the perceptions and' experiences of youtlidn relation to patticip~fion inpolitical violence. ;It examined the .relatierrship between exposure to state violence, expo§ure todomestic violence,. ideological support for violence and participation in poMticaLviolence;andexplored the extcat to .which 'g~nder, age and socio-econemic status inf1u~nced,paiticip~at1o~ inpolitical violence.' ,\\IIThe traditiL\nal an~ contextual theories of violence th~tTorward explanations for participa~()n inpolitical. violence lwere reviewed and their merit relative to viqfence participation. criticallyexamined. o ,U .!,} _..Ojl,.i \ \r)''~;; , /.) ,.}A structured self questionnaire was developed after an initial pool of item J pertaining to violencewere generated, their psychometric properties.ofmtemal consistency ass(jssedand these clusteredinto the. various violence; scales. The revised questionnaire was adnlinistered to first entryundergraduate students (n= 1902, N:.:2677) at the Universityofthe Western Cape. The datawasanalysed using quantitative methods, such as chi-square analyses, t-tests and cortelation ryatdces.Data that showed a high degree' of self-reported~ untruthfulness was discarded frorii furtheranalysis. The level of statistical Significance was set at p< Oj0001.(IThe results reveal that the majority of respondents were victims of state violence. Participation'in political violence is significantly related to exposure to state violence, an '~deological supportof violence, as well as to being male and older.Gender and age differences were noted for participation in political violence with older malesbeing politically violent. 1~lere wag, no significant difference for socio-economic status andparticipation ill political violence.The variable that showed the strongest relationship to participation in political violence wasexposure to state violence (r=0,77), followed by ideological supportof violence (r=O,;2). Therelationship of participation in political violence to exposure to domestic violence thoughsignificant was poor.(r=Oj08).Thus the study found that participation in political violence is mainly a function of exposure tostate violence and is context specific. The youth had not learnt to be politically violent by beinginvolved in domestic violence.Contextual theories seemed to offer a better explanation for participation in political violence foryouth in South Africa. Future research should focus on the interrelationships between 1~6litica1violence and interpersonal violence.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand