“Where were you when they got pregnant? You are the authority so make sure you arrest the culprit before they impregnate the young girls,” a tough-talking Rift Valley Regional Commissioner George Natembeya told the chiefs in his jurisdiction in a widely circulated social media clip.
It’s a question that every adult in Kenya needs to ask him or herself in relation to teenage pregnancies: “Where were you when they got pregnant?” Because the inconvenient truth about teenage pregnancies is that we are all culpable, even if some public figures seem to be working very hard to make us believe that’s not the case.
The recent news that nearly 4,000 girls in Machakos were impregnated in the past five months have elicited two familiar reactions: denial and finger-pointing. None of these two reactions solve anything. The Ministry of Health, while acknowledging that there is a problem, also proclaimed that the numbers reported in Machakos were “exaggerated, outrageous and not a true reflection of the actual statistics”. Exaggerated or not, what’s not in question is that the pandemic has not been with its own trials on the fate of women and girls, as the reports of increased cases of domestic and sexual violence attest to. Notably, there was no accompanying commitment from the ministry on specific actions that would help address the scourge.
Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha blamed it on “the exposure to adult content”, adding that it led school-going children into experimenting with premarital sex.
Not one to be left out of a controversial debate involving morals, the Kenya Film Classification Board CEO Ezekiel Mutua blamed the surging numbers in Machakos on “vulgar vernacular music”. Among some Kenyans, the common cultural narrative is that teenage pregnancy is a question of morals, so it’s often taken as a referendum on the girl’s character.
The day everybody stops blaming teenage pregnancies on the “loose morals of the girls” is the day we’ll start winning. If anyone has loose morals, then it’s the adults responsible for impregnating the little girls.
Some Kenyans have gone ahead of themselves and poked holes into the numbers provided by the Kenya Health Information System, calling it an attempt by NGOs to “whip up public outrage and create support for the Reproductive Healthcare Bill”.
Among other things, the Bill seeks to provide a framework for the protection and advancement of reproductive health rights for every person.
Anybody who needs “shocking statistics” to recognise that there’s an endemic problem needs to be checked for amnesia, for nothing is new about the staggering numbers.
The point all these blithe explanations and objections miss is that scapegoating the issue only serves to seriously injure attempts to address the problem. Apportioning blame to external forces while not acknowledging our own role is counter-productive.
So, where were you, as Mr Natembeya asked? Perhaps you were busy spreading propaganda on social media about the Reproductive Healthcare Bill. Perhaps you were busy opposing the Comprehensive Sex Education proposal. Perhaps you were embroiled in a bitter argument about why the girls were to blame for being pregnant.
Or maybe you were busy switching off the vulgar music on radios and TVs. And was that you arguing passionately for lowering of the age of sexual consent?
If the answer is ‘yes’ to any of these questions, then you are complicit in crucifying our teenage girls. It’s hard to imagine where the political will to contain the scourge will come from because they’ve had numerous opportunities in the past to do so and failed the teenagers.
Perhaps the ultimate antidote to the scourge might be for each of us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves what role we can play at an individual level to address the rape culture and gaps in sexual health education.
Ms Oneya comments on social and gender topics.; @FaithOneya
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