Strategies police use to identify microaggression in public in the Gauteng province, South Africa

Abstracts: Worldwide, women experience an array of unfair discrimination such as microaggressions. The continuum of microaggression includes microinsults, microassaults and microinvalidations. The subtle nature of microaggressions makes it difficult to respond to it, to engage in self-defense or seek protection from others. Vulnerable groups must communication their experiences to solicit protection from significant others when self-defense is unlikely to ward off a threat of microaggression. South Africa is infamous for high gender crimes and most women fear walking alone in public. The purpose of the study was to explore the policing of microaggression in the Gauteng province in South Africa. The research objective was to ascertain how police identify microaggression experienced by women in Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane municipalities, in the Gauteng province. The study objective was to also establish police perceptions of their role in microaggression directed towards women in public. The methodology was a qualitative research, phenomenological design, with purposive sampling strategy. Twenty police officials selected from six police stations located in the three municipalities had consented to being interviewed. The three emerging themes were body Language, policing styles and criminal laws. Results showed that most participants identified microaggression through women’s body language, and relied on criminal laws to identify and police microaggression. Most participants regarded themselves as protectors of communities, which represents the service policing style. Training women how to use universal SOS distress signals was recommended to enable them to adequately communicate on threats of microaggression. The research findings were ungeneralizable due to the small sample size. Keywords: Communication, dignity, microaggressions, patrols, protection, threat.