"The FAMILY" or Families

After the United Nations declared 1994 as the Year of the Family, interest in the study and analysis of families increased, albeit with constant references to 'normal' versus 'deviant' families. Meanwhile, HIV/AIDS has become increasingly topical, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where it has adversely distorted families, but few discourses have placed HIV/AIDS within family contexts. This study thus Explored the effects of Home-Based Care (HBC), as a response to HIV and AIDS, on the makeup of families, and showed that poverty, panic of having chronic illness in a household and survival considerations related thereto forced people from various families to live in one household so as to make the care of the ill convenient. Care was found not only to be shared between persons regarded as family members, but was received from trained community volunteers, while the presence of child-headed families as a result of AIDS-related deaths defied the normalization of 'the nuclear family'. The study thus teaches that families cannot be understood in aggregated terms, but that individuals and the circumstances they face define what families become, not the other way round.

Autorentext

Kudzai Makoni studied Psychology at the University of Zimbabwe between 1993 and 1995, before joining a Zimbabwean NGO, Silveira House, as a Research Officer. Within five years he resigned to become a full time research consultant, aged 26. He then enrolled at the University of Western Cape for a Masters degree in Child and Family Studies in 2009.