PART II: UNEQUAL, TRANSITIONAL CONTEXT
4. Introduction: Rendering trans-generational and lifespan inequality visible
4.7 Application of the conceptual framework
Taken together, the framework allows for an intersectional and multi-perspectival analysis of the South African context and restorative justice processing, within the broader theme of peacebuilding. On the one hand the framework allows an analysis of
135 how crime is constructed in the South African context. On the other hand, it provides a lens through which to conduct an examination of whether victim offender mediation, as an expression of restorative justice processing, is responsive to the macro and micro patterns of interaction that constitute the unequal, transitional context of crime. The conceptual framework and the trans-temporal, multi-level, cross-cutting approach it takes, is depicted in figure 4.2 and is explained hereunder.
4.7.1 Vertical: levels of analysis
The vertical analysis helped me to capture different levels of analysis and action (from intrapersonal, interpersonal, family, group, community, national, international to the global level) within the frame of analysis, where necessary. The concept restorative justice enabled me to plot the vertical level(s) at which restorative justice processing functions, as a sub process of peacebuilding. This level intersects with the horizontal and crosscutting levels which enabled me to see that victim offender mediation focuses at the intra- and interpersonal (relationship) levels and does not include the structural levels made visible by the display in figure 4.2.
4.7.2 Horizontal: past, present, future analysis
By using a horizontal analysis, I sought to capture within the frame of analysis, South Africa’s transition from its unequal, colonial and apartheid past to the present in which the inequality gap has increased; and an anticipated future in which social justice, human rights and equality will prevail according to the South African Constitution (1996). The concept peacebuilding, in the conceptual framework, enabled me to capture the transition from past to present and the anticipated social justice for the future. The intersection of the horizontal dimension with the vertical and crosscutting dimensions helped me to understand the nested nature of inequality in South Africa.
4.7.3 Cross-cutting analysis
To simplify the display, I depict only two cross-cutting lines; however relevant cross- cutting phenomena such as economic, political, psychological, social and other categories are included in the discussion, as they become salient. The concept social justice, as the third concept of the conceptual framework, is aligned with the cross-cutting dimension.
136 The social justice lens helped me to disaggregate and get a clearer understanding of the nested forms of trans-historical inequality over time and at different levels of analysis.
4.7.4 Intersections
This part of the display depicts the intersections of horizontal, vertical and cross cutting dimensions of various social phenomena. It provided insight into the interaction of individual and structural factors that produce crime.
4.7.5 Visual display of the conceptual framework
As it stands, the display that depicts the conceptual framework for this study is a simple reflection of a multi-perspectival approach. However, it is intended to depict the multiple and simultaneous (cf. Hill Collins, 2000) intersections and interactions between
individual characteristics and vertical, horizontal and cross-cutting social phenomena.
The individual is assumed to be located at the point where all these phenomena intersect as displayed in figure 4.2 number three. The display shows that these factors can be made analytically distinct, but that they are not experientially separate and therefore cannot be severed in real life, even if individuals are unaware of the intersections and interactions that bear down on them. Read together with Warnat’s (2012) model depicted in figure 4.3, the simple display for this section is intended to show how the conceptual framework arises out of a complex understanding of South Africa’s unequal, transitional context and the interaction with individual level factors. It also shows that the basic model can be adjusted to analyse different situations, as in the case of Warnat’s (2012) study of employment equity in the South African context for which she adapted and adjusted Dhamoon’s (2010, 2011) work which she incorporated into Henkeman’s (2011)
137 model ‘in order to incorporate a sufficient degree of complexity’ (Warnat 2012:37).
4.7.6 Display of core features of a multi-perspectival analysis
Warnat (2012:38) arrived at the most succinct description for the intersection of social phenomena. She argues that:
The crux of the intersectional argument is the recognition that individuals’
categories of difference intersect with other categories of difference. The categories of difference, and the intersection between them, then interact with systems of domination, history, and various socio-political spaces.
(Warnat, 2012:38).
This description holds true, in part, for the interaction between a victim and offender in the context of restorative justice processing. This suggests that before a harmful act is committed (at the interpersonal level); other social structural level phenomena have already intersected and interacted with factors within the offender (at the individual level). This interplay between social structural, intra- and interpersonal intersections and interactions, lie at the heart of this research. It forms the basis of the underlying
Peacebuilding
Social Justice
1. Levels of Analysis 3. Intersection
4. Cross-cutting
2. Past 4. Crosscutting
Present issues
Future issues Future
Restorative justice
Figure 4.2 The conceptual framework: Peacebuilding, restorative justice, social justice
138 hypothesis of this study, that a gap exists between restorative justice theory and practice in the context of inequality and transition in South Africa. The conceptual framework is intended to reveal the extent of, and reason for the perceived gap.
Psycho-social, socio-economic, political-economy and any other relevant intersections and interactions of interest for this study, are the mix of factors that co-produce crime and social harms within a specific context. For example, with regard to the individual, the intrapersonal aspects are taken into account as well as interpersonal interactions with other individuals. The same applies to intra- and inter-family; groups; communities;
localities, provinces, region, nation and globally. Where applicable, all relevant levels are taken into account to a lesser or greater degree in the multi-perspectival conception advanced here. Each configuration helps to fill out the bigger picture, but there will always be a margin of error or a blind spot in any human endeavour. A multi-perspectival approach, with its obvious overlaps, greatly reduces the size of the glaring blind spots left by many single lens approaches. I have used relevant single lenses sequentially and iteratively, and then combined and blended the data gathered to give as true a picture as is possible of lived reality.
This complex understanding of the interaction between the individual and the social world is at the heart of the framework discussed here. It enabled me to take complexity into account by moving iteratively between microscopic and macroscopic, as well as multi-perspectival views of the instrumental case (victim offender mediation as a form of restorative justice processing) and the broader topic of this research (peacebuilding).
Figure 4.3 provides a visual display of the more complex version of intersectionality developed by Warnat (2012) while figure 4.2 is a simple version that foregrounds the conceptual framework to show how it merges with the context from which it arises.
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Figure 4.3 Warnat’s intersectional model based on Dhamoon & Henkeman’s work
4.7.7 Self awareness and default perspective
Critique that is not willing to open itself up to critique cannot be properly considered critique. (McFarlane, 2006:36).
As stated before, my standpoint is that of a historically oppressed black woman whose default response to oppression and domination is resistance. This standpoint also
produces my default perspective on social phenomena, as depicted in figures 1.1, 4.2 and 4.3. However, my awareness of the partial nature of perspectives, prompts me to
acknowledge that other perspectives and standpoints exist and that I should take account of them. In the context of knowledge production and the subjugated knowledge of black women, McFarlane (2006:30) suggests that the main issue is not with:
[O]ppression as such, but rather with the relation one has between one’s standpoint in the matrix in relation to knowledge …we could assume that the majority of social scientific knowledge has an especially close
relationship with the standpoint from which much of it was produced; that is, the standpoint of white men. (McFarlane, 2006:30).
I would argue that within society and academia in general and South Africa in particular, the most dominant and therefore most powerful standpoints with regard to knowledge
140 production are those of white men, white women and black men in relation to the
subjugated knowledge of black women. Black women scholars on the other hand, occupy an economically more privileged and more powerful location in relation to knowledge than do working class and marginalised white men, white women, black men and black women. My education also places me in the category of post apartheid beneficiaries who appear to have deracialised the middle class. Self-critique therefore becomes vital for any critical social theorist who claims to actively work for social justice, regardless of their location in the matrix of domination.
I approached the construction of the conceptual framework and the entire research process reflexively, self-critically and tentatively over a prolonged period, rather than with a stance of ‘absolute certainty’ and a position of ‘absolute truth’. Over the years I have introduced a crude model and exercises which concretise an understanding of this multi-perspectival approach in lectures and workshops, as it is adaptable to different topics. This way of thinking makes me aware that, because of my social location and the fact that I am embedded in South African society, my blind spots and shadow will cause me to deny or overlook something that other researchers, who are located differently, might see more clearly than I do.
When I explained a crude version of this conceptual model in peacebuilding training workshop or lecture situations, I also made participants aware of the duality of human nature through the concepts of shadow (Jung, 1953:177), blind spots as exemplified in Johari’s window developed by Joseph Luft & Harrington Ingham (Runde & Flanagan, 2010:135) and the notions of human disposition towards ‘good’ and/or ‘evil’ (depending on the situations they find themselves in) as discussed by Zimbardo (2007). Based on the question of human duality, Warnat (2012:40) depicts a sun and a moon in her display, which captures her understanding of self awareness, blind spots and shadow as follows:
As intersectionality developed out of the feminist movement, it calls on us always to critique ourselves and our processes … to question accepted norms and realities, and to accept our own weaknesses. Henkeman (2011b) argues that each of us has a ‘light’ and a ‘shadow’ side. Rather than
assuming we have an innate nature of either good or evil, she points out that we all have the ability to be either, depending on the context. (Warnat, 2012:40).
141 The emphasis I place on self awareness on the one hand and contexts on the other; and the implied interaction between individual and contextual factors, reveal my own bias and how I control for it, with regard to harmful behaviour in general and crime in this
research. I side with unorthodox criminologists who believe that society and the criminal must be changed as there are multiple and simultaneous intersections between individual and social structural factors which interact to produce crime/social harm. As Sen
(2008:15) cautions, there is a need to avoid ‘isolationist programmes of explaining violence only through concerns of economic and social inequality and deprivation, or exclusively in terms of identity and cultural factors’ (my italics). He argues that ‘none of these individual influences, important as they very often are in a fuller picture, can provide an adequate understanding of the causation of widespread violence and the absence of societal peace’ (my italics). Instead, Sen draws attention to the
interconnections between these influences, which, he argues ‘are as important as the elements that have to be connected’ (2008:15). In sum, South Africa’s history of inequality combines the ingredients that produce violence which according to Galtung (1996:2) and (2008:10) is an interaction between economic, social, cultural and political aspects. On this view, apartheid was the perfect recipe for disaster.