Grade 9 students' accounts of conflicts and abuses in a formerly Indian school near Durban.

Abstract

The aim of my study was to investigate the nature of possible conflicts between Grade nine learners. Focus group discussions were conducted with about forty learners; boys and girls, Black and Indian, aged between fourteen and sixteen at a formerly Indian school near Durban. In these, I started by asking very general questions and then picked up on what the young people said, asking them to elaborate and illustrate. In this way, I tried to put the onus on young people themselves to set the agenda. I am interested in investigating whether learners will talk differently about conflict depending on whether they were in different kinds of groups marked by 'race' and gender. Therefore, I divided the participants into mono-racial single sex as well as mixed gender and mixed 'race' groups. According to all the participants in the focus group discussions, conflicts between pupils were very common at Grade nine levels. However, what sort of conflicts they spoke about and how these were spoken about, and especially those that related to gender and 'race', differed significantly between the various kinds of focus groups mentioned above. This paper reports on these conflicts and compares the kinds of conflicts spoken about in the different kinds of groups.