TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 7

Subsection 15

Social identities: Preconditions for violations

101 Put most simply, people do not act only due to personal or individual attributes. We also act in terms of the norms, values, standards of groups that provide us with social identities (racial, national, ethnic, gendered). When groups are in hostile, suspicious relations with each other, we are capable of acting towards others in a dehumanised fashion, treating them as the enemy, as described in Mr Adriaan Vlok’s statement:

We also have to remember that we were engaged in war and that makes it even more difficult to really do what you ought to do. And we made a mistake, we should have listened to people … but we were engaged in a war, we had all been indoctrinated not to listen to each other …

102 In such situations, people act primarily in terms of their social identities rather than personal attributes. What implications does this have for explaining violence? The critical implication is that the psychological dynamics of inter-group relations are of a different order from those of interpersonal relations. Perpetrators’ actions are instances of inter-group rather than interpersonal relations, and require a different order of psychological explanation. A range of possible options may make the contrast clear.

103 One class of account places the emphasis on a loss of personal identity, or a loss of moral restraints. This understanding is common enough in everyday descriptions such as “killing frenzy”, “mob madness” “war brutalisation” or “losing control”. This “loss”, or dysfunctional, class of understanding is also prevalent in formal psychological theorising such as de-individuation, extreme stress, frustration, aggression and the like. These versions imply a move away (disintegration) from a normal personal rationality into a mode of irrationality, or a regressed, more ‘primitive’ state.

104 A second class of understanding motives explains violence as a product of personal or interpersonal psychology. Violence is due either to an intrinsic personality trait or type such as a sadist, psychopath, Machiavellian or authoritarian type, or conversely an inner psychological state or mood (rage, jealousy, frustration, revenge, provocation induced via interpersonal processes and interactions). Such explanations do not account adequately for violence against categories of people with whom we have little or no interaction, as in the case of warfare. The two domains, interpersonal and inter-group, are controlled by different processes.

105 A third class of explanations is located at an inter-group level. We act towards or against others because they are construed as members of other groups/categories: the ‘enemy’ or the out-group. Processes which contrast group differences, stereotype the other and promote ethnocentrism all serve to differentiate, distance from and ultimately dehumanise members of other groups. This goes hand in hand with strong feelings. This is put very succinctly by Mr Adriaan Vlok in his testimony to the Commission:

I believe that most policemen who found themselves in such a situation, where he found himself obliged to act in an illegal way, probably did this by virtue of his position as a policeman and not from personal considerations.

106 Numerous and multiply overlapping influences reinforce and manufacture these particular social identities. Here again is former Minister Vlok:

There was a plethora of various influences on a typical Afrikaans-speaking conservative, Christian person, for instance teachers at schools, parents and the way they brought up their children, professors and teachers at university, eminent people in society by means of statements and documents, the press, politicians in their statements and policies and the ministers in their churches.