In this article, we draw on data from focus group discussions to examine the ways in which some young boys in a South African township primary school construct and negotiate hegemonic masculinity through bullying, and other forms of violence, within the school. Deviating from the simplistic victim-bully binary, we draw from critical masculinity…

Girls' vulnerability to sexual violence and harassment is a recurrent theme in much of the literature on schooling in sub-Saharan Africa. Within this research, girls are often framed as passive victims of violence. By drawing on a case study, this paper focuses on 12 to 13-year-old South African school girls as they mediate and participate in…

Objective: In South Africa, Black African women between the ages of 15 and 24 years are especially vulnerable to HIV. The heterosexual transmission of the disease is exacerbated by social and cultural conditions that perpetuate gender relations of inequality. Problematic conceptualisations of femininity increase sexual risk. The objective of this…

Interviews conducted with township girls in South Africa show enduring experiences of sexual violence both in and out of the school. Fear of boys and men were articulated in relation to boyfriends, male teachers, men in the township neighbourhood and men in the home. While the girls attempted to exercise agency in arresting their fears, these…

In the context of the calamitous effects of gender violence on the experience of schooling for South African girls, single-sex schools have been advanced as a strategy to protect girls from violence. In this paper, the experiences of a selected group of girls in a single-sex school in Durban, South Africa are illustrated to provide a counter…

Gender-based violence is a reality in many societies and is linked to the spread of HIV and AIDS. There have been numerous studies that have attempted to acquire an understanding of the breadth and depth of the issues around gender-based violence. However, one area that has received scant attention is the voices of women teachers. Thus, in this…

Whenever gender violence and schooling have been the topic of South African research, the investigations focus on African boys in secondary schools. In contrast, this paper focuses on the ways in which violence is mobilized by African schoolgirls in a working-class primary school context. By drawing on selected elements of an ethnographic study of…