Substance use and multiple victimisation among adolescents in South Africa
Section snippets
Background
Since South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994 there has been a decline in political violence among young people, but assaultative violence involving weapons, sexual assault, domestic violence and gang-related violence remain a problem. Violence is a major public health concern (Krug, Mercy, Dahlberg, & Zwi, 2002). It not only causes injury and death but also affects cognitive, behavioural, social and emotional functioning among adolescents in South Africa (Ensink et al., 1997,
Participants
The sample consisted of 1474 adolescents, 633 of whom were sampled in Durban (43%) and 841 (57%) of whom were from Cape Town. They were interviewed in 2001 and 2002. The sample included 804 (54.5%) girls and 670 (45.5%) boys, and their mean age was 14.68 years (S.D. = 1.65). In total, 644 self-identified as “African” (44%), 317 as “coloured”(22%), 299 as “white” (20%), and 211 as “Indian” (14%), which refers to being of African, mixed, European and Asian descent, respectively. These labels
Results
The findings indicate that 845 (57.3%), 340 (23.1%), 164 (11.1%), 79 (5.4%), 31 (2.1%) and 15 (1.0%) of the respondents reported having experienced none, one, two, three, four and five of the five different types of violent acts, respectively. In other words, about one fifth (19.6%) of the total sample reported having been multiply victimised, where multiple victimisation refers to having experienced two or more types of acts of violence in the adolescent's lifetime (Outlaw et al., 2002). The
Discussion
To our knowledge, this is the only study to have explored the importance of various types of drug use and psychosocial variables within the domains of intra-personal, peer, family and environmental factors in predicting multiple victimisation among adolescents in South Africa. The number of different types of victimisation reported by respondents in this study and the rate of multiple victimisation of 20% was almost identical to that reported for adolescents in a national survey of 4023
Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was presented during a plenary session at the 31st Annual Conference of the Global Health Council in Washington, DC, USA. The research was supported by a Research Scientist Award DA 00244 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, and a Fogarty International Collaboration Award 1 R03 TWO1344, both to Dr. Judith S. Brook, as well as by funding from the Medical Research Council to Dr. Neo K. Morojele. We are grateful to Mavis K. Moshia
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