Who’s Learning or Whose Learning? Critical Perspectives on the Idea Youth-Led Policy-Making Related to Gender-Based Violence in a South African Classroom

This chapter comes out of a growing recognition that in spite of the seemingly rich policy context in South Africa for combating gender-based violence in and around schools, the rates remain unacceptably high. At the same time, rates of HIV, especially for girls and women and particularly for those in context of certain rural districts, are also unacceptably high. Taken together these two sets of “facts” about growing up in rural South Africa call for innovative approaches at the school level to influence the everyday realities. Several years ago in a participatory video-making workshop involving teachers, learners, community health-care workers, and parents, a group of learners produced a video called Rape at School: Trust No One. The video is a powerful indictment of the abuses of power by teachers and highlights an almost taken-for-grantedness that teachers are not to be trusted. While the focus of the video is on the abuses by a male teacher of a female student, there is an underlying sense that this is too common an occurrence to escape the notice of all teachers (female teachers as well as male teachers) and all learners. The chapter sets out to lay bare the learnings that are demonstrated by “the learners” (the preferred term by the South African Department of Education to refer to students in public school classrooms). It then goes on to consider the ways in which participatory visual activities such as participatory video can disrupt the everyday by calling attention to the all-too-common experiences of abuse and at the same time can offer the possibility for both youth and adults to engage in policy dialogue about issues of safety and security in and around schools. In so doing the chapter draws attention to the significance of the place of reflexivity and youth engagement if there is to be social change.