Community Psychology

1. Introduction

Communities are complex and the term “community” can be defined in a diverse manner. Thornton and Ramphele in Terre Blanche,Butchart and Seedat (2002:251) provides us with many possible descriptions of the term ‘community’ as it can be a political term, a term that can be used to describe loose entities like the ‘business community’ or ‘international community’, generic labels for official racial categories like the ‘Black community’ or the ‘Indian community’ and so forth. Although a difficult term to define, I can describe the community I live in as an aggregation of people who have something in common, the residential area or the geographical region if you will which fits in nicely with how Thornton and Ramphele in Terre Blance et al (2002:252) describes ‘Community’ in South Africa amongst other.

Highjacking, mainly of cars, is currently a big problem in my community being a residential area as already mentioned. A traffic laden municipal road runs through our suburb with three traffic lights at busy intersections which were identified as ‘Highjack hotspots’ This road begins in a traditionally called black and coloured township and is one of the main routes into Pretoria’s central business district.

The financial loss incurred when one’s car has been highjacked albeit a problem in itself, is not the biggest problem of highjacking. Many other problems are related to highjacking which have a major influence on the mental health of the individuals as well as the community such as loss of life, dealing with the trauma of the event, influences incurred on the family of the victim and so forth which cascade further into an unhappy community as it consist of many unhappy members.

To combat the problem of highjacking in my community, I will design a large-scale programme to combat this problem by utilising key principles of community psychology.

2. Principles of Community psychology

In designing my program I will to a larger or smaller extent...