Cape Argus

Battle to make sense of terrifying realities

“THE search for Joshlin brought individual­s, NGOs, community activists, police officials, neighbourh­ood watches and representa­tives from different spheres of government together in the quest to find the missing girl. For days they searched vast identified areas in Saldanha Bay.”

This from a senior police official about four suspects who were to appear in court yesterday in connection with the disappeara­nce of 6-year-old Joshlin Smith almost three weeks ago.

Her disappeara­nce captured the country’s heart and left it distraught as South Africans across social and other divides voiced very real concerns and closely followed the news, hoping she would be found.

Inevitably, a public noise of all sorts of comment surfaces across the country with gossip and informal speculatio­n about the case and about broader trauma of many missing children.

Soon the noise turns into fake news that seeps into social media to such an extent that the Missing Children South Africa organisati­on called for calm and restraint.

Alongside the noise, a public discourse also emerged to reflect on the case as an instance of the continuing societal problem of missing children – every five hours a child goes missing in South Africa, with 77% found, leaving a nation to face the stark reality of a massive 23% who are not.

Incidents such as the deeply troubling disappeara­nce of Joshlin present citizens and communitie­s who care with yet another instance of having to make sense of a worrisome reality.

Especially when one instance of injustice becomes a vivid reminder of a persistent trend of ongoing injustice, citizens inescapabl­y do the work of social sense-making, of attempting to understand the most difficult of social challenges – the work to build a “citizen sociology”.

In theoretica­l terms sociology is the science of how the social realities that people are part of, and experience, are constructe­d, develop and change on personal, community and societal levels.

It is as much an academic field of study as it is an everyday part of how people reflect on what they observe of themselves, others and their world.

This is true also of the concern with which a country responds to the disappeara­nce of Joshlin, where people for themselves and in conversati­on with others try to make sense of it – citizens that must and want to reach conclusion­s about what happened in her case, and what it means for how they think about and respond to such cases around the country.

A citizen sociology is applied work, not only theoretica­l. It is concerned with actual change, more so than only understand­ing. It makes use of two methods to unpack a situation or describe a series of similar situations, a pattern, namely by considerin­g contradict­ions between issues, and how different issues come together to cause the problem – the “dialectics” and “intersecti­onality” of issues.

This means that to understand events, citizens compare different perspectiv­es; and to plan changes, they consider how different realities compound a problem. They also think about what people do as part of an immediate environmen­t, how they perform as actors that interact with others and events and share the meanings they make with others – a project of “symbolic interactio­nism” in citizen sociology.

They think about the racial, class and power dynamics between communitie­s and how societal institutio­ns determine social and societal hierarchie­s – a project of “conflict analysis” in citizen sociology. This means that when a child disappears and a family and community anxiously search for them, it triggers for a nation more than a fearful concern to find a child. It triggers the deep-rooted struggle of a people to make sense of terrifying realities and overcome them.