Cruel and unusual : aversion therapy and apartheid South Africa’s struggles with white ‘deviant’ behaviour and sexuality

Abstract

This study investigates the role of science, religion, and race in the abusive use of aversion therapy practices in South Africa during the apartheid era to deal with white ‘deviant’ behaviours. Existing literature on aversion therapy in South Africa predominantly focuses on the abusive treatment of homosexuals within the apartheid military. However, this thesis illustrates that aversion therapy treatments were applied to a wider constituency of pathologized individuals, namely drug addicts, alcoholics, and homosexuals. These cohorts were targeted for behaviour ‘rectification’ in order to protect the wider (Afrikaner) society from degeneration. Building on the works of scholars such as Neil Roos, this thesis establishes the pattern of control of white society created by the state through psychosocial and medical engineering. In addition, the thesis explores the roots of the perceived social ills that befell South Africa, namely alcoholism, drug addiction, and homosexuality that threatened to erode apartheid society’s Calvinist morals and customs. Furthermore, the thesis sheds light on the forms of resistance towards the invasive treatment methods used to ‘cure’ perceived ‘social deviances’. Through the study of aversion therapy practises and methods of psychosocial engineering, this thesis will illuminate an awkward moment of an alliance between science, race, and religion. These developments are placed in a comparative international context by looking at how similar practices evolved in places like Britain, Czechoslovakia, and America.