SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

VIOLENCE AND AGGRESSIVE INHERENT AND

LEARNT BEHAVIOURS AND ACTIONS.
. FRUSTRATION, VIOLENCE and
AGGRESSION
 Forms of Aggression
• Is aggression determined by our genetic
factors?
• Is aggression determined by our social
environment?
Harming others has found many new forms of
expression (Baron & Branscombe, 2014) such
as humiliating others - reality shows
to more traditional forms such as terrorism
through to serial killings, genocide and
burning libraries.
 Drive Theories
• With the rejection of the ‘Instinct view of
aggression of Freud and Lorenz, recent
approaches are reflected in the drive theories
a(Berkowitz, 1989; Feshbach, 1984).

• These theories propose that external

conditions – especially frustration- arouse a
strong motive to harm others.
 Drive Theories of Aggression:
Motivation to Harmful Others
External conditions Drive to Overt
(e.g., frustration, harm or aggression
Unpleasant injure others
Environmental
Conditions)

Drive theories of aggression suggest that aggressive

behaviour is pushed from within by drives to harm or
injure others. These drives, in turn, stem from external
events such as frustration. Thus the frustration-
aggression hypothesis.
 Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis
• Frustration-aggression hypothesis is a very
powerful determinant of aggression
• Dollard et al., 1939 indicated that
1. Frustration always leads to some
form of aggression and
2. Aggression always stems from
frustration
In short, the theory, held that frustrated people always
engage in some type of aggression and that all acts
of aggression in turn, result from frustration.
Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis
 Does the frustration-aggression hypothesis be
used to justify and/or explain:
• Destroying/burning down schools, as in the
recent cases of 24 schools destroyed due to
disputed municipality border lines?
• Breaking of infrastructure windows that are
still required after the vandalism, such as at
WSU?
• Destroying and/or burning down libraries and
documents, such as in Limpopo?
 Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis
• However NOT all frustrated individuals
respond with aggression.
• Thus, aggression is definitely not an automatic
response to frustration.
Research findings by Baron & Branscombe (2014,
p.354), indicate that physical or verbal provocation
from others is one of the strongest causes of human
aggression. When we are on the receiving end of
some form of provocation from others – criticism we
consider unfair, sarcastic remarks, or physically
assaults – we tend to reciprocate, returning as much
aggression as we have received.
 Determinants of Human Aggression
• Determinants of Human Aggression include:
Basic Social Factors
“the words or actions of other people either
in the flesh or as shown in the mass media”
(Fischer & Greitemeyer, 2006).
Cultural Factors
“such as norms requiring that individuals
respond aggressively to insults to their
honour; thus bringing up aspects of
personality, traits that predispose some
people towards aggressive outbursts”.
 Determinants of Human Aggression
Situational Factors
“aspects of the external world such as high
temperature and alcohol”

 Displaced frustration and/or violence is the

tendency to in-directly aim our anger and/or
violence at other objects/person; other then
the actual targets.
 Learning Theories
• Learning theorists assert that violent behaviour
is learned through childhood models in the
family of origin.
• Men learn the ‘appropriateness’ of using
violence as a means of conflict resolution.
• There is a strong correlation between violence
in the family of origin and the later perpetration
of violence against female partners
• Women unable to escape from their abusive
situation develop a form of ‘learned
helplessness’
 Women Abused
• Abusive men have been described as
extremely jealous (Hotaling & Sugarman, 1986
in Boonzaier, 2003, ch. 9).
• Violent men have been described as more
aggressive and dependent than their non-
violent counterparts (Kane & Staiger, 2000 in
Boonzaier, 2003, ch. 9).
• Abusive men have been described as
evidencing borderline or antisocial personality
characteristics.
 Women Abused
• Victims precipitation theories suggest that
women possess particular characteristics that
lead to their victimisation (O’Neill, 1998).
• Studies by Snell et al (in Hydén, 1994)
indicated that characteristics of abuse suggest
as women as aggressive, efficient, masculine
and sexually frigid, with controlling and
dependent theories.
• Men in the study were described as passive,
indecisive, impotent and alcohol-dependent.
 ‘Open Wounds’
• South Africa has the highest rates of rape in the world,
according to Interpol, and the highest incidence of HIV.
• The National Prosecuting Authority tells us that 50 percent of all
cases before South African courts are for rape, except in Durban
and Mdantsane, where it is 60 percent.
• The Law Reform Commission estimates there are 1,7 million
rapes a year, on average only 54 000 rape survivors lay charges
each year.
• 75 percent of rape in South Africa is gang rape
• A rape survivor does battle with the police, doctors,
psychologists and the courts to get the justice she deserves, and
to protect the next woman or child.
(Ref - http://www.hst.org.za/news/rape-has-become-way-life-
south-africa)
 ‘Open Wounds’
• Last year the cabinet removed Section 21 from the
new Sexual Offences Bill, which would have given
post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP, which is medication
to prevent HIV) as well as medication to prevent STIs
and pregnancy to rape survivors. They left in Section
22, which guarantees medical care for the rapist and
undertakes to rehabilitate any alcohol or narcotics
addictions he might have.
In other words, the government will help to remove
self-inflicted addictions from the criminal, but won't
have legislation compelling hospitals to provide
women and children with the medication that
prevents them from getting criminal-inflicted HIV
 ‘Open Wounds’
• Professor Ames Dhai of the University of Natal
points out that there are twice as many rape
survivors at risk of HIV than there are babies
born in South Africa to HIV-positive mothers, yet
there are few calls for PEP for rape survivors. She
asks: Is it because of residual stigma against
those raped?.
Just over a month ago a 21-year-old student was forced at
knifepoint into an alley off Long Street, Cape Town, and
was raped. When she went to Groote Schuur Hospital
she, like many rape survivors, found it difficult to use the
word rape. She was re-referred to her private doctor
and had to wait until the next morning .
 ‘Open Wounds’
• In the case of a young man raped in
Wentworth, Durban, three years ago, when
he was 14, the thugs who raped him offered
his impoverished grandmother R3 000 to get
him to drop the case. She wanted the money,
but he refused despite continuing threats.

(Ref - http://www.hst.org.za/news/rape-has-become-way-life-
south-africa)
 South African Statistics
• UNAIDS reported last year that in South Africa two-
and-a-half times more women are infected than men
because many women experience forced sex.
• UNICEF reports that six times more girls than boys in
Africa are infected with HIV.
• A Human Sciences Research Council study found a
significant cohort of HIV-infected children whose
mothers were not HIV-positive. How did they become
infected?.
• In South Africa, police tell us, 41 percent of those
raped are under the age of 12. In Meadowlands,
Soweto, police say 90 percent of rape in that
community is against children younger than 12.
 The ‘Roar of a Woman’
• About 150 women report being raped to the
police in South Africa daily. Fewer than 30 of
the cases will be prosecuted, and no more
than 10 will result in a conviction. This
translates into an overall conviction rate of 4%
- 8% of reported cases. In this edited extract
from her new book, Rape Unresolved: Policing
Sexual Offences in South Africa, Dee Smythe
(2016) explores why this is the case.
 ATTRITION
• For a range of reasons, attrition happens in
the criminal justice system, so that not all
reported cases are prosecuted and not all
prosecuted cases result in conviction.
• While attrition is to be expected in any
functional criminal justice system, it occurs in
an institutional context that is shot through
with discretion.
 ATTRITION
• One scholar has gone so far as to suggest that
… (w)hat we call the criminal justice “system” is
nothing more than the sum total of a series of
discretionary decisions by innumerable
officials.

The actions of criminal justice actors and the

decisions they make are a crucial part of the
attrition story.
Systems, Structures and Society in
South Africa
• The police decide whether to open a case,
whether they will investigate it, and how
much effort they will put into accumulating
evidence and finding the perpetrator. It is
their choice (whether they recognise it as such
or not) to encourage a complainant in her
efforts to bring the perpetrator to justice or to
acquiesce in her withdrawal from the justice
system.
 Systems, Structures and Society
• The police decide whether a case should be
referred to the prosecution.
• Prosecutors decide how to frame a particular
set of facts as an offence – shaping a fit
between what they can prove happened, and
a set of elements that defines the conduct as
criminal. They decide whether a case has
sufficient merit to be taken to court, what
evidence will be brought, who will be heard.
 Systems, Structures and Society
• And ultimately, a judge decides whether the
state will provide redress.
• Throughout this process, manifested at key
decision points, cases leave the criminal
justice system. In this way criminal justice
actors have the power to select those whom
the state will protect, who will be put on trial,
and who will obtain justice.
• South African system is patriarchy and usually
those in decision-making bodies are males.
Stereotypes of what constitutes RAPE
in South Africa
• Scholars studying attrition in rape cases generally
explain the low rate of reporting and conviction in
these cases by pointing to the stereotypical views
held by criminal justice actors about what constitutes
a sexual offence, and who can validly claim to have
been victimised.
• It is argued that the beliefs that have become
scripted into criminal justice practice, with the result
that the cases filtered out of the system are not
those that are intrinsically weak, but rather those
that offend the normative assumptions of decision-
makers.
Stereotypes of what constitutes RAPE in South Africa
• Studies conducted over the last 40 years have shown
that the closer the fit between the facts of the rape
reported and the decision-maker’s conception of
what constitutes “rape” (as opposed to “bad” or
even “normal” sex), the more likely it is that the case
will proceed successfully through the system.
• On this account, “violent” rapes committed by
predatory “strangers” against “respectable” (for
which read white, middle-class, married or virginal)
women, who are injured while resisting, have
become the paradigm cases against which all rape
reports are measured in the criminal justice system.
Stereotypes of what constitutes RAPE in South Africa
• Complainants who are perceived to have precipitated their
own victimisation, whether through their conduct or their
relationship to the perpetrator, are at a particular
disadvantage.
• Being drunk (or accepting a drink from the alleged
perpetrator), hitchhiking, flirting or selling sex all diminish a
complainant’s credibility and the validity of her claim on the
criminal justice system, even where there is evidence that the
accompanying sexual acts were coerced.
• Despite evidence that intimate-partner rapes are among the
most violent manifestations of sexual violence, until relatively
recently most jurisdictions have regarded marital rape as a
contradiction in terms, and provided little protection to
women who are raped by their husbands.
 what constitutes RAPE in South Africa
• The residual effects of centuries of prejudice linger
tenaciously in criminal justice canons of sexual
violence, relentlessly reproducing unjust outcomes,
at the same time as they produce our very
conceptions of sex and sexuality. Cultural beliefs
about women and sex, and the notion that what
women really want – what they find romantic or
erotic – is to be overwhelmed by male sexual
aggression, infuse “common sense” social and legal
opinion, often leaving victims of rape without
recourse or protection.
Questions to Ask One’s Self as a Social Psychologist and/or Human Being

• Where do children below puberty and/or as babies fall into,

in terms of the facts of the rape reported and the decision-
maker’s pre-conception of what constitutes “rape”?
• With approximately a population of 55 million in South
Africa, of which 30+/- are ‘blacks’, and do not fit into the
‘neat paradigm cases’ of white, middle-class, married or
virginal - attributional bias, how then can the attitudes
towards these paradigm cases in the criminal justice system
be changed?
• Do we need to re-learn how to form intimate relationships,
‘love ourselves and love our neighbours’ to gain self-esteem;
as Maslow, 1954 hierarchy of needs study suggests?
• Where is Ubantu?
 Police’s story
• The police tell a different story. At least, in
South Africa they do. Theirs is a tale of unco-
operative victims.
• Police talk about complainants who cynically
use the criminal justice system, fabricating or
exaggerating rape complaints to further their
own instrumental goals – of revenge or
extortion, mostly – or to explain away their
sexual misdemeanours.
 Police’s story
• Police say that an inordinate number of rape
complaints received by them are false, and suggest
that in certain communities this has become a
common means of exacting revenge on male
partners (past or present).
• Substantial numbers of rape complainants withdraw
charges once they or their families have received
financial compensation from the perpetrator.
• And finally – to a lesser extent, although very much
prevalent in specific areas – direct or indirect
intimidation forces complainants to withdraw
charges
 Police’s Discontent Story
The Police’s discontent runs along the following lines:
•investigating rape complaints is often a frustrating
waste of time, and
•the effort required to investigate those cases needs to
be weighed against other urgent organisational
pressures and priorities, particularly in a resource-
constrained environment such as South Africa.
•They argue that South Africa is fighting a “war on
crime”, and the police are the vanguard. If rape victims
are not serious about their own cases, they have only
themselves to blame if they don’t get justice.
 References
• Baron, R.A & Branscombe, N.R. (2014). Social psychology.
Thirteenth Edition. Pearson New International Edition.
• Boonzaier, F. (2003). Women Abuse: A Critical Review.
Chapter 9. In Identities and Relationships. Social Psychology.
Kopano Ratele & Norman Duncan, 2003. UCT Press.
• http://www.hst.org.za/news/rape-has-become-way-life-
south-africa. Accessed 12 May 2016
• Smythe, D. (2016). Rape Unresolved: Policing Sexual Offences
in South Africa Taschenbuch Publisher. The Conversation.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2016/02/19/Rape-in-South-
Africa-why-the-system-is-failing-women. Accessed 12 May
2016
• Charlene Smith (2004). Sexual violence and post-exposure
prophylaxis. Sunday Independent, 26 September 2004