Couples living with and around alcohol abuse: A study of a farmworker community in the Cape Winelands, South Africa

Abstract

RationaleLow-income Coloured Western Cape communities in South Africa display high rates of problematic drinking, especially binge-drinking over weekends. Alcohol abuse in these communities is linked to the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV), fetal alcohol syndrome and sexual violence against women. Few studies, however, have investigated the social contextual factors that perpetuate alcohol abuse in these communities. Objective and methodOur study contributes to the need for social contextual knowledge need by providing an understanding of how committed couples, who lived and worked in one low-income historic farm worker community, located in the Cape Winelands of South Africa, constructed alcohol use and abuse in their relationship. Using a social constructionist grounded theory we analysed the consecutive interviews conducted with individual partners. FindingsThree themes shed light on our participants' alcohol use discourses. The first theme highlights participants' apparent lack of identification with the problem of alcohol abuse, despite the omnipresence of alcohol abuse in their accounts. The second theme draws attention to men's and women's explicit and implicit support of gendered norms regarding alcohol consumption. Linked to the previous, the third theme accentuate women's toleration of men's “quiet” weekend binge-drinking. DiscussionWe point out the limitations of local alcohol policy and intervention efforts to address normative drinking discourses and practices in this research community.