South Africa is infamous for its apartheid system of discrimination, which existed from the 1940s to the 1990s. Today, however, the issue of violent crime has taken center stage. In fact, a recent United Nations study listed South Africa among nations with the highest rates of assault, rape and murder.
Jeanne Flavin, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology and anthropology (and author of Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America ), will travel to the African cape nation this month on a Fulbright fellowship to research the involvement of South African women in crime and the criminal justice system.
The research, Flavin said, will help provide an understanding of apartheid’s lingering impact on the social, political and economic forces in women’s lives, and offer a glimpse at what led women to commit their offenses.
“You constantly hear about how much crime there is in South Africa,” said Flavin, who will spend six months with the University of Cape Town’s Gender, Health and Justice Research Unit. “Women are being caught up in the criminal justice system there, and I suspect many of these women have also been victims of violence. I want to learn more about the relationship between women, crime, family and kinship networks.”
To read more, check out the article at Fordham University’s website.
