ULTERIOR MOTIVES THAT LEAD TO SOCIAL FRAILTY

The vignettes of social interaction have in many ways evolved and transgressed to the most mundane, and the most obsessed, obnoxious interactions - lingering to the sick social, psychopathic instability. Psychosocial tendencies have been affected by the lack of moral values in family life, and community standing.

Many people enter the scene of social life to gain experience and improve their communiqué skills; to gain more friends; to advance their human knowledge and find uniformity in their spiritual, emotional, and physical existential matters.      

  

However, in the past decades, more and more people are prone to commit repugnant social-ills and fall some people for prey to such social-ills. Psychosocial tendencies have in previous years led to a fundamental psychological question:

Do you as an individual enter another person’s life with ulterior motives, to reach your ill-begotten ambitions, no matter what happens or the consequences there off? Or do you enter a person’s life to motivate, inspire and uplift their livelihood: sustain and bring stability to them?

There are some individuals that go out of their way to use social interaction through various networks, including close-contact to prey on other individuals sexually and physically violently by luring them into their lives, pretending to be friends but at the end just bare psychosexual predators, and stalkers.

Social Networks such as ToGo, Mixit, Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp et al. – have been used to lure people to private mysterious places then preyed on sexually and physically at times leading to murder.   

    

We are the conversant images of our spiritual selves. What affects the emotional, physical and mental – touches on the inherent spiritual side. Technology preys on this notion to make one whole gain; creating an emotional vulnerability that needs a physical presence to ease the emotional, physical, mental and spiritual yearning, and neglect.     

At times, emotional vulnerability is an after effect of all the storms of verbal, physical and emotional abuse – we humans do not really grasp the thin veil that constitute and separate “Real Love” and “Obsession Love”. Thus, in Loving someone, we use emotional ordnance to hide the abuse and pain that has lingered to that has lingered for years, and has gnawed on the emotional stability that keeps one sane, therefore fragmenting the very little ground they stand on – their world.

The worst part about this psychosocial instability is that, the person that scarred the perpetrator doesn’t get the same punishment they gave or pleads for forgiveness. They get away with the most atrocious crime of abuse, and the abuse, the perpetrator takes it out on the wrong person.

WORD TO A NEW PSYCHOSOCIAL EXISTENCE REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala     

SPELLING IT CLASS! _ C.O.R.P.O.R.A.L – CORPORAL PUNISHMENT!!!

Corporal Punishment was a sore thumb in a not so distant past, as a disciplinary mechanism within the Bantu Education schooling system in the helm of the Apartheid administration. Will the amendment of Corporal Punishment bring change in our schools or improve the standards of learning in our education system?

Many Black students were disparaged psychologically, to attend school due to the callousness that teachers and headmasters took to administer discipline, through a sjambok or a well smoothen twig that was smacked to the buttocks or the hand of the punished scholar.     

Pupils were punished for various misdemeanours, one being incompetence in doing their homework, or failing to answer a question connected to a particular subject, and content of discussion in class. This practice of corporal punishment was at times pushed to the precincts of brutal abuse by teachers who had grudges towards their pupils.

An ethnic indifference usually brought a division amongst teacher and student, thus the child was given a thrashing, because he or she is from such and such tribe or ethnic group. Others were beaten for stating their political, education ideals or for voicing out their disagreements against the state of affairs.   

The worst part about corporal punishment was experienced when a dyslexic or autistic student was given this same treatment for failing to comprehend the content at hand – creating a traumatic neurotic dilemma for the child that’s already in a world of innate confusion.      

I remember when I was a youngster, attending Bantu schools: Thulisa Primary School and Endulwini Primary School in Katlehong and Tembisa, respectively. When students were summoned to the principal’s office - one could hear sonorous cries of a youngster, fending off pain from a stick that was specially crafted for this atrocities deed, called punishment.

In one occasion, a student was beaten on both her hands, and she left school with both hands severely swollen, with red cracks on both, for being cheeky and chatty towards the teacher. She rubbed onion on those hands, I was told.

When I started school I was very much of an introvert and I had a problem with my hand writing, because I loved drawing so much that when I want to write I would end up turning the written text into a rough sketch, therefore my books looked all neat, but raggedy inside. My then, teacher did not understand and failed to give me guidance on how to improve on my handwriting – for this reason, she saw it fit to beat me up until I could write properly. This went on until my grandfather intervened by coming to the school and warning my teacher that she must stop abusing me. My handwriting did improve and I become a star pupil. (other teachers told me I had a doctor’s handwriting)  

Although our generation was beaten at school, it was a rare thing to find that a scholar dropout for being punished. Why? A group of boys was sent to one’s house to go collect a ‘deserter’ and bring them back to school if that happened. In one odd occasion, one child ran away from home and become a street-kid, because he was given a hiding  at school for not having done their homework, and a thrashing at home for spending too much time in the streets with his friends.        

        

A review on the constitutionality of corporal punishment as a legislative measure to instil discipline and improve our education system; into our South African education structure will need a much needed discourse, debates amongst government officials, school headmasters, parents, children and a national referendum, that will cement or reject the Corporal Punishment Law as a mechanism to punish our children in school.

WORD TO A NEW EDU-DISCIPLINARY MEASURE REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala