Among the many other crimes that flood South Africa, gender-based violence (GBV) is increasingly becoming a major problem facing the country. Studies have revealed that women and girls are much more likely to be victims, and, in most instances, the perpetrator is known to the victim. This crime has irrepressibly posed great threats to the human rights of women and girls, both locally and internationally, laying serious foundations for engrained progress on women`s rights. This study adopts a qualitative document analysis to examine the phenomenon and suggest a community policing approach—among other preventive policy recommendations—as a paradigm shift in strategy to resolve the crisis in South Africa as well as prevent the future occurrence of such a menace in the country. The findings highlight that the preponderance of criminal justice interventions has resulted in gender-based violence being framed as a problem of criminal law and procedure, police investigation, and appropriate counselling programmes for both victims and perpetrators. However, this approach emphasises amelioration rather than prevention. Hence, the need for community policing as a prevention strategy against gender-based violence. Moreover, this paper recommends the establishment of a stronger partnership and the continuation of seeking ways for closer cooperation between law enforcement agencies and communities for a better prevention of gender-based violence in societies.

IPV is a significant worldwide problem. In general, men are considered perpetrators of this type of violence, but they can also be victims. Relevant pieces of literature uphold women as the principal victims of IPV. An emerging question raised within this context is, “What about the men who are also victims of IPV?” So far, there are limited studies that describe men as victims, especially in Nigeria and West Africa. The routine activity theory of Cohen and Felson was used to provide a theoretical backdrop to the discourse in this study. Precipitant factors like class, culture, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and religion influence male victimisation circles. Indeed, policymakers, social and health care planners, and providers have not paid much attention to men´s victimisation at the local and international levels. There is an urgent need to modify policies and laws concerning IPV by including men as victims.

This article investigates some of the constraining factors experienced by 16 school-going mothers in the Okalongo circuit, Namibia. This was a qualitative phenomenological study, conducted through in-depth individual interviews, focus group discussions, and reflective journals with 16 school-going mothers between the ages of 17 and 20, purposively selected from three different public rural schools. This qualitative, phenomenological study analyses, through feminist and intersectionality theory, the lived experiences of these young mothers as they encounter the traditional, patriarchal attitudes and practices of the Ovambadja community because these girls fell pregnant before their formal, cultural initiation. The article documents, through the voices of the young women themselves, the numerous constraints they experienced and overcame in their determination to complete their schooling. The findings show that, aside from the deeply held destructive patriarchal beliefs that significantly constrain and harm the mother-learners, the Namibian Learners Pregnancy Policy, which is intended to protect and ensure pregnant learners and mother-learners complete their schooling, is not being properly or effectively implemented. The study recommends an increase in efforts at the national level in Namibia to raise awareness among members of parliament, school administrators and principals, and all policymakers to develop better monitoring systems that will improve policy implementation in schools.

In sub-Saharan Africa, monitoring and evaluation of outcomes of health literacy are critical to the response to Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). As guided by Arksey and O’Malley’s framework, this scoping review explores the nexus between gender and HIV-related health literacy. PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Taylor and Francis Group constituted the sources of literature. The study analysed emerging themes using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis (PRISMA) chart. From 2048 articles, the final analysis focused on 37 articles. Generally, women had lower education levels than men. Low HIV-related health literacy manifested among women residing in rural and under-served settings. A dearth of research addressing HIV from a gender perspective was identified. Future studies on HIV-related health literacy should consider gender mainstreaming in their endeavours.

The study examined healthcare choices and challenges among female inmates in selected correctional facilities in Nigeria. This is with a view to examining the major healthcare challenges and choices available. The study employed the descriptive research method, the purposive sampling technique was employed in the selection of the correctional facilities, while the proportionate sampling technique was used to select the female respondents, and a 50% proportion was used. While descriptive analysis was used to analyse the primary data, such parameters as frequency, percentage, mean, and inferential (Pearson’s product moments correlation coefficients) were adopted in the analysis of the primary data. The study reveals that there is a positive and significant relationship between available healthcare and female inmates’ reproductive health, as well as a negative and insignificant relationship between major healthcare challenges and female inmates’ health. The study concludes that available healthcare and female inmates’ reproductive health move in the same direction, while major healthcare challenges and female inmates’ reproductive health move in the opposite direction. The study recommends that in order to improve the female inmate’s reproductive health, the available healthcare facilities require improvement, and the identified health challenges should be addressed as public health issues by the medical practitioners. It is also recommended that a large proportion of the health sector budget be directed towards providing qualitative health facilities in the correctional facilities across the nation in order to improve the standards of female inmates’ reproductive health status.

Teenage pregnancy is one of the common problems that is indiscriminately present in all schools. With teenage pregnancy manifesting in all schools, a lot of focus and support regarding this issue is given to female students (girls), while none is given to male students. Literature will be reviewed during this study as a methodological approach. It is an underlying assumption of this research that the spirit of feminism could be blamed as a motivation for this one-sided focus and support. However, this paper argues that in a proper approach to parenting at any level, it makes no sense to support one victim of teenage pregnancy while there are two victims. Since scholars like Scott and Salvi have scratched the surface of this issue of teenage pregnancy, it is worth taking the discussion further because they tackle the issue from a more feminist perspective. Their feminist approach to this issue makes them focus more on the impact it has on females than males. It is the major aim of this paper to focus on the ignored perspective of teenage pregnancy. The psychoanalytic rationality approach adopts an analytic theoretical framework to critically argue that it is not enough to use a narrow feministic approach that envisages only female students as the only victims of teenage pregnancy. Perhaps the bias in analysing and understanding this crucial issue that has affected many lives comes from the fact that only women physically bear the baby in their wombs while men remain with no physical manifestation of pregnancy. As Ntshangase argued that feminism should be properly conceptualised as a rational framework to cater for both existential coordinates known as male and female, this paper argues for a proper feministic approach to be adequately applied to this issue of teenage pregnancy.

The question of women’s development and empowerment is not new in the world. As such, there has been an increasing awareness of the matter, especially that development has had a differential impact on power relations in society, usually to the disadvantage of women. For countless times, the world has had many pro–women empowerment measures and proclamations made by various governments and continental and domestic agencies, but women continue to be overlooked in crucial spheres of life such as politics, law, education, and training, as well as working environments. This paper used a desktop review method to first, identify the underlying factors behind power differentials between men and women in leadership and society at large, and second, examine how such factors compound gender inequality in South African polity. The discussion shows that South Africa’s and the African continent’s experience with women's empowerment and recognition in the political landscape still exhibits gender disproportions with which the compounding factors cannot be differentiated. These include, inter alia, the inconsistent application of a political will to keep women in leadership spaces and the existence of patriarchal systems embedded in many African cultural practises. The paper concluded by strongly arguing that any development that is based on patriarchy is anti–development and must be rejected. Any efforts made to elevate women in to positions of power would mean an end to the old question of gender inequality, but this requires serious, deliberate policy interventions and implementation.

This paper reports on stage four of a longitudinal study (2004) with women in Uganda, exploring the long-term relationship between post-primary education and empowerment. 13 of the 15 participants from the original study participated in this Feminist Participatory Action Research project and shared their understandings of how they understood the intersections of education and employment to be empowering, disempowering, and what stood in the way of their economic empowerment. Methods included semi-structured questionnaires and interviews, a two-day workshop, and a focus group discussion. A triangulation design (Cresswell 2008) and constructivist grounded theory approach were used for data analysis. Findings indicate the scope of economic empowerment was severely constrained by historic and extant economic, social, and cultural factors that continue to discriminate against and disempower girls and women. Historic and extant global and national systems and practises that are rooted in, and perpetuate gender-based inequalities, disempowerment, and exploitation need to undergo transformative change to provide women with authentic opportunities and freedom to achieve real empowerment (Cornwall & Rivas, 2015).

This quantitative cross-sectional comparative exploratory study was aimed at exploring participants’ perspectives on employees thriving at the Polokwane Local Municipality (PLM). It compared the overall male and female professional staff’s perceptions of employees thriving. The sample size comprised 149 male and 133 female professionals. The measuring instrument was reliable at 0.8063 Cronbach’s alpha. The study reported that male and female participants had similar perceptions of employee thriving. It also reported that growth and development were significantly associated, while liveliness and devitalisation were insignificantly associated. Also, it revealed that liveliness and growth are significantly related to development, and devitalisation is inversely related to growth. The study recommended that the organisational climate be designed to empower the employees and enhance their thriving attitude towards work. Also, stakeholders and motivational speakers on employees’ thriving strategic efforts are buffed to adjust for factors that are important when intervening in the career counseling and career choices of municipal employees. Future studies may need to pay attention to different municipalities in the province and beyond.

Violence in its various forms (be it physical, verbal, or structural) is enacted by political figures against women journalists across the globe. This study focuses on the violence experienced by women journalists reporting on politics in Brazil and South Africa. The paper examines the question: How are elements of violence enacted against women journalists by political actors in South Africa similar to those in Brazil? The study samples eight pieces of visual data in which the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and President Jair Bolsonaro verbally and physically assault women journalists. The research explores the individual and intersecting tenets of gender-based violence in both contexts. Videos from Brazil and South Africa were sourced from YouTube and Twitter and analysed using thematic analysis. The two main themes the paper explores are: strategic gender-based violence and the avoidance of accountability, and the intersections of power, patriarchy, and physicality. The research concludes that the political figures are aware of the woman journalist’s position in society and use strategic forms of violence to wield their power to both undermine and silence the journalists. Their strategy requires a violence toolkit that consists of the structural and patriarchal gender-based violence embedded in both contexts. The politicians want to avoid accountability for their actions as well as ensure that the woman journalist understands the risk and violence they face if they continue to probe and question them. The paper recommends that further studies should research the strategies that are used to address the gendered violence experienced by women journalists.