CheckPoint Podcast | Are We Raising Boys For Violence? Prof Malose Langa On How Masculinity Is Made

CheckPoint Podcast | Are We Raising Boys For Violence? Prof Malose Langa On How Masculinity Is Made Vusi.Bafetane Tue, 10/06/2026 - 21:11

Violence Prevention Starts Long Before The Police Station

South Africa often talks about violence at the moment it becomes visible: after an assault, a murder, an arrest or another national outcry. By then, however, the story may already be years in the making.

That is one of the more uncomfortable implications of psychologist Professor Malose Langa's work with boys growing up in Alexandra. His research did not begin by asking which boys would become violent. It asked what it meant to be a boy, and then listened closely enough to discover that the answer changed depending on who was in the room.

Individually, boys could express relatively progressive ideas. In groups, Langa found that some shifted towards familiar masculine expectations: toughness, multiple girlfriends, fighting and other performances of what a boy was supposedly meant to be. He describes this tension as a difference between a public and private script. Beneath the bravado, he encountered shame, uncertainty, vulnerability and the emotional cost of trying to perform an approved version of masculinity.

That finding matters because it moves the violence conversation upstream.

If masculinity is partly learned, reinforced and policed socially, prevention cannot begin only when someone reaches the criminal justice system. Langa points instead towards the institutions surrounding children much earlier: homes, schools, churches, streets and early childhood development spaces. His argument is not that these institutions mechanically produce violent men. It is that everyday messages about strength, fearlessness, gender and acceptable behaviour accumulate long before society encounters their possible consequences.

South Africa's own policy architecture increasingly recognises that prevention must be broader than policing. The National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide includes prevention and rebuilding social cohesion as one of its central pillars, while a Cabinet-approved Programme of Action has called for greater engagement with men and boys to challenge harmful norms.

The problem, then, is not simply recognising prevention as important. It is turning that recognition into sustained practice.

There is evidence that this can work. Langa refers to Stepping Stones, an intervention evaluated by the South African Medical Research Council, as an example of programmes that created spaces for young people to discuss relationships, gender, sexuality and violence. SAMRC reporting on the intervention found changes in young men's sexual practices and violence perpetration, while cautioning that further research remained necessary.

Langa's own research offers another lesson: boys cannot be reduced to the worst stereotype available to describe them. His earlier academic work with 32 adolescent boys in Alexandra found multiple and sometimes contradictory masculinities, including boys simultaneously complying with and resisting dominant masculine norms. Wits University later summarised his decade-long work as a challenge to the homogenised portrayal of young black men as inherently violent or destructive.

This does not minimise violence or excuse perpetrators. It changes the prevention question.

Instead of asking only how to punish violence after it occurs, institutions also need to ask what they reward, tolerate and teach before it occurs. What does a five-year-old learn about being a boy? What behaviour wins approval at school? Which emotions are permitted among friends? Which versions of manhood are celebrated in communities and popular culture? And where can boys practise something different without being humiliated for it?

Late in his CheckPoint conversation with Nkepile Mabuse, Langa's frustration shifts from individual behaviour to institutional implementation. Researchers, he argues, repeatedly produce findings and examples of interventions, yet the country can behave during every new crisis as though no answers exist.

That may be the larger accountability question. South Africa has invested heavily in understanding violence. The next test is whether institutions can become as serious about preventing its social production as they are about responding once the damage has already been done.

References

· Malose Langa, Becoming a man: exploring multiple voices of masculinity amongst a group of young adolescent boys in Alexandra Township, South Africa, University of the Witwatersrand.

· South African Medical Research Council, Stepping Stones evaluation.

· South African Government, National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide and Programme of Action on GBVF.

· CheckPoint: The Podcast, interview with Prof Malose Langa, 6 October 2026.