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PsySSA Commemorates International Children’s Day 2022

PsySSA Commemorates International Children’s Day 2022

by | Jun 1, 2022 | COVID-19, Divisions, Media and Public Awareness, Society for Educational Psychology of South Africa (SEPSA)

International Children’s Day is celebrated on June 1 of each year. In 1925 the World Conference for the Well-being of Children declared June 1 as the day to focus the world’s attention on issues affecting children. The Conference adopted the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

Much of the legislated inequalities and discrimination of the Apartheid regime were removed when South Africa became a democratic country under president Nelson Mandela in 1994. Mandela is fondly remembered for his love of children. Birthdays were a special occasion where he could be seen smiling, surrounded by a crowd of excited children. Those occasions no doubt made his Day.
Under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, discriminatory practices against children based on race were removed. Today we have Section 28 of the Bill of Rights which ensures that each child has the right to:

• A name and a nationality. Family care or parental care, or to appropriate alternative care when removed from the family environment.
• Basic nutrition, shelter, basic health care and social services.
• Be protected from maltreatment, neglect, abuse or degradation.
• Be protected from exploitative labour practices.
• Not to perform work or provide services that are inappropriate for that child’s age or risk the child’s well-being, education, physical or mental health or spiritual, moral or social development.
• Not to be detained except as a measure of last resort and may be detained for the shortest period of time, and to be kept separately from adults.
• Be treated in a manner, and kept in conditions that considers the child’s age and have a legal practitioner assigned by the state.
• Not to be used in armed conflict, and to be protected in times of armed conflict.

Although we are guided by the Bill of Rights, we still have violation of these rights by adults. These include use of child labour, violence against children, child customary marriages, parents denying their children the right to education, food and shelter.

Let this International Children’s Day be a day of re-dedication where each of us can work towards protecting and caring for our children, who are the future of our country.

Author:

Dr Guru Kistnasamy

To whom it may concern!

Hear our voices
We depend on you
We are the future and the future starts small Consider our feelings, reach out to us
You are our hope and we will be your hope to Wash our hands and we will wash yours to Help us and we will help you too
Love us and we will love you too
Who am I?

I am a child – a little flower

I am a precious smile

By Nsuku Valentine Shivambu, a 17-year-old child rights activist from Alexandra Township, Johannesburg. https://www.savethechildren.org.za/news-and-events/blogs/covid-19-access-to-educationhttps

 

Every year, International Children’s Day is celebrated on 1 June. The origin of this holiday dates back to the 1925 World Conference for the Well-being of Children. After this date, countries across the world recognised children’s rights to affection, right to adequate food, right to medical care, right to education, and right to protection against all forms of exploitation, neglect, abuse, and right to grow up in a climate of peace and community spirit of Ubuntu.

Children and youth are considered to be a blessing and should be encouraged to flourish and their voices heard. According to our Constitution this includes decision-making, on all matters that affect them, including education, social issues, and mental health.

In a country still recovering from inequalities in the education system, from availability of smart-cellphones, data, and other gadgets or access to textbooks to self-educate to access to clean and/or running water and electricity, there is a need for parents, caregivers, medical and mental health professionals, government leaders and civil society activists, religious and community elders, corporate companies and media professionals and young people and children themselves to play a pivotal part in making International Children’s Day an inspirational entry-point for advocating, promoting, and celebrating children’s rights. In this way, translating dialogues into actions that fosters a better world for children their families, communities, and nations across the world.

Author:

Dr Diana De Sousa

PsySSA Commemorates Freedom Day 2022

PsySSA Commemorates Freedom Day 2022

by | Apr 27, 2022 | Community and Engagement, Community Engagement, COVID-19, Media and Public Awareness

Where have the heady memories of the very first General Election called for 27 April 1994, through negotiated settlement, gone? Long, colourful, winding queues of almost 20 million generally overjoyed South Africans of all hues, beliefs and position waited patiently to cast their vote. Elections were extended to 29 April to cater for the more than 90% of first-time expectant voters. On 9 May 1994, the newly-constituted democratic Parliament unanimously elected Nelson Mandela as our founding President.

On 28 March, the IFP marched on the ANC Johannesburg headquarters protesting against the elections that they were boycotting. Nineteen protesters were killed, which the Nugent Commission found was unwarranted. Amidst a national and international sigh of relief, the IFP agreed a few days before 27 April to participate. As the ballots had already been printed, IFP stickers were hurriedly added to the already printed ballot papers. The elections were peaceful, although subsequent elections have had the spectre of terrible violence, with deadly contestation before and after the results.

These details reflect some of the anticipation and excitement when PsySSA was inaugurated in January 1994, after protracted negotiations began in 1991 between the white-dominated PASA and the black-dominated Psychologists Against Apartheid, with participation of the Professional Board for Psychology, the Organisation for Alternate Social Services and the Black Psychology Forum.  PsySSA was the first national non-racial professional society to be formed in South Africa, in advance of the advent of democracy.

Those shaping PsySSA’s Constitution acknowledged up front “psychology’s historical complicity in supporting and perpetuating colonialism and the apartheid system” and committed us to, inter alia:

  • Transform and redress the silences in South African psychology to serve the needs and interests of all South Africa’s people;
  • Develop an organisational structure for psychology that reconciles historically opposed groups, amplifies the voices of hitherto excluded users of psychological knowledge and skills;
  • Ensure that PsySSA remains an organ of civil society without an overt or covert loyalty to any political party;
  • Advance psychology as a science, profession and as a means of promoting human well-being; and
  • Actively strive for social justice, oppose policies that deny individuals or groups access to the material and psychological conditions necessary for optimal human development, and protest any violations of basic human rights so as to render and advance mental health services to all South Africans.

While all around us there is the shattered landscape of devastation, desperation and destitution – occasioned by official malfeasance, COVID-19 impacts, natural disasters that  could have been mitigated, and declining education, health and professional training  – we should pay tribute to those who truly gave their all so that we enjoy the fruits of democracy. As we should to those who led PsySSA – from its shaky beginnings, it’s fraught breakaways and strident diversions – and who grew the successive leadership, including many of psychology’s outstanding minds. While the late Rachel Prinsloo and Lionel Nicholas were inaugurating PsySSA three months before democracy, let us not overlook the students Sumaya Laher, Garth Stevens and Shahnaaz Suffla who went on to lead us! Their and our combined challenge is to ensure that psychology is more demographically representative, is seized with crafting policy and interventions that repair the fractured psyche that confronts us, and ensure that psychology plays its rightful role, becoming “more publicly accessible and expanding its role in SA society.” Together we should set “the tone for a psychology that reflects social concerns, transcends personal interest and group prejudice” and truly serves all of  humanity.

Scientists’ Open Letter for the Marine Arctic Peace Sanctuary

Scientists’ Open Letter for the Marine Arctic Peace Sanctuary

by | Apr 4, 2022 | Events and Announcements, Media and Public Awareness

Dear PsySSA member,

We are reaching out to you as volunteers for the Parvati Foundation, a nonprofit that urges people around the world pay attention to the crisis in the Arctic Ocean that affects all life on Earth. As the Arctic ice vanishes and the global consequences multiply, there is still a window of opportunity to avert total catastrophe. However, an immediate response is required, measured in weeks and months rather than years. We believe this can be achieved through the Marine Arctic Peace Sanctuary (MAPS).

MAPS will safeguard the entire area north of the Arctic Circle as the world’s largest marine sanctuary. It prohibits commercial tourism, fishing, oil and gas activity, shipping, militarization and dumping of waste that destroys the sea ice, makes the permafrost disappear, reviving buried pathogens, and threatens to cause large scale methane eruptions. MAPS is the only initiative to include protection of the coastal waters where the majority of exploitation takes place. The science is clear that protecting the Arctic High Seas is not enough to protect life on Earth. As Yvo de Boer, Former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, says, “MAPS is the only sane choice for the critically vulnerable Arctic ecosystem, for the sake of our seas, our atmosphere and all life.”

We urgently need scientists from all disciplines including students to join us in educating the public about this emergency, so we can mobilize world leaders and the public to protect the Arctic Ocean and our shared future. We must help shine a light on the irrefutable scientific evidence showing that MAPS is essential.

With this in mind, we are now circulating an Open Letter to be endorsed by scientists and students to voice their support of MAPS

 

 

Click here to read the Open Letter

We hope that you add your name to the letter and  join the growing number of influential scientists, including 20 Nobel Laureates that have recently signed it.  Please share the Open Letter within your network.

Thank you for supporting a health world! 

Sincerely,

Kaya Agu – MAPS Ambassador

 

 

370 YEARS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE – QUO VADIS SOUTH AFRICA?

370 YEARS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE – QUO VADIS SOUTH AFRICA?

by | Mar 20, 2022 | Collaborations, Events and Announcements, Media and Public Awareness

370 YEARS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE – QUO VADIS SOUTH AFRICA?

Over 370 years South Africans experienced 19 wars of land dispossession. San populations were reduced to just a few thousand people with most social formations totally wiped out through genocide. Among others, the Khoe and AmaXhosa peoples’ social, economic, and cultural life was severely disrupted by ethnocide.

For over 200 years we had the system of slavery where over 78 000 people were relocated from over 105 locations in Africa and Asia. Their successive generations of descendants were also enslaved, dehumanised, exploited, and subjected to violent abuse. Following this was indentured labour, migrant labour and labour brokering systems – new forms of trafficking and slavery.

A devastating war between two colonial factions negatively impacted the majority black population, and a new country – the Union of South Africa – was declared without consultation with 90% of the population. Social engineering resulted in over 140 African societies being forced to assimilate into 10 national groups classified as Natives or Bantu/Black, and 7 groups classified as Coloured, which still have negative polarising effects today.

The system of Apartheid followed. It declared that those classified as Black had no citizenship of South Africa, only of Bantustans in 13% of the territory. Those classified as Coloured were stripped of their African birth-rights and relegated to sojourner citizenship sans rights. An Apartheid police and militarised state terrorised people into submission – including continuous massacres – Sharpeville in the 1960s, the killings in the national youth protests in 1976/77, and brutal suppressions of protest in the 1980s. Banning of opposition political organisations, detention without trial, imprisonment of political opponents, death squad murders, and torture and death in detention, as well as widespread military aggression in neighbouring states defined over 30 years into the early 1990s.

Today the generationally transmitted trauma of past crimes against humanity, the highest forms of human rights abuse, still haunts and ravages our society. It is this chain of human rights abuses, still denied by the economically powerful white minority, together with the post 1994 continued use of Apartheid frameworks, which challenges us today. Pouring new wine into old Apartheid wineskins, and endemic corruption by a new Political Estate, resulting in atrocities like the Marikana Massacre, Life Esidimeni tragedy, Xenophobic attacks, politicians stealing finances meant to reduce poverty, and politicians’ actions that resulted in 342 deaths in the July 2021 social explosion – gives cause to reflect.

Astronomical unemployment, social depravation, homelessness, and ghetto built-environments next to palatial personal infrastructure and bling lifestyles of a new elite demands new thinking on human rights abuse in 21st century South Africa. The vortex of current human rights abuses and trauma, built on the old, has many asking – “Quo Vadis South Africa?”

In celebrating Human Rights Day, 21st March 2022, we have much cause to reflect, but even greater cause to act to halt cultures perpetuating human rights abuse. A direct corelation exists today between behaviours of the political and corporate elite, and the state of the poor whose basic human rights are being violated on a grand scale.

PATRIC TARIQ MELLET

STRUGGLE VETERAN, AUTHOR, AND HERITAGE CHAMPION