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Gender and Childhood Sexuality in Primary School pp 99–112Cite as

“These Kids Live a Hard Life”: Inequalities, Violence and Gender in Everyday Teaching

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Part of the book series: Perspectives on Children and Young People ((PCYP))

Abstract

This chapter begins the specific focus on KwaDabeka School. It focuses on how teachers provide meanings of gender and childhood sexuality within the context of poverty, food insecurity, fragile households, absent fathers and violence. The social, historical and economic roots of children’s suffering at KwaDabeka School point to the tragedy of systemic ‘structural violence’ in South Africa, the legacies of apartheid and the enduring patterns of unemployment and inequalities which continue to have effects for the African majority. Economic disadvantage at KwaDabeka School has effects on how teachers conceptualise the harshness of everyday life, which produces toxic patterns of gender relations often accompanied by violence. Beyond the dominant discourses that construct children as carefree, naïve and innocent, the teachers set in motion the different experiences of gender at KwaDabeka School. These complexities, from the teachers’ perspective, are the focus of this chapter. The chapter highlights major contradictions within the earlier construction of childhood innocence, as it provides insight to the specific manifestation of teaching discourses within the local site at KwaDabeka School underlined by structural inequalities and gender violence where the ‘survival of the fittest’ is a common theme.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

    Deevia Bhana

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  1. Deevia Bhana
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Correspondence to Deevia Bhana .

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Bhana, D. (2016). “These Kids Live a Hard Life”: Inequalities, Violence and Gender in Everyday Teaching. In: Gender and Childhood Sexuality in Primary School. Perspectives on Children and Young People. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2239-5_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2239-5_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-2238-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-2239-5

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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