IN December 2012, a 17-year-old student doing Form 4 appeared in court to answer to allegations of having sexual intercourse with his 15-year-old girlfriend who was then doing Form 3 at Eveline Girls High School in Bulawayo.
Phillip Chidavaenzi
The young man admitted having had sexual intercourse with the under-age girl.
This was after his girlfriend had visited him at his parents’ house where he was by himself and subsequently refused to go home after 7pm fearing her mother’s backlash.
In her statement to the police, the teenage girl admitted that they had consensual sex twice.
“My mother asked me where I was and I told her the truth. That is when she reported the matter to the police,” she said.
Although this could have been an isolated incident, going by the trend observed at the Harare Magistrates’ Court, it is clear that teenage sex has become a widespread phenomenon as young people increasingly become experimental with their sexuality.
NewsDay noted that almost every day, at least one case of a young man who would have slept with an under-age girl is heard at the court.
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In almost all the cases, most of the boys — aged between 15 and 17 — said they did not know that the act was a criminal offence since the sex was consensual.
Having sexual intercourse with a person under the age of 16 is criminalised under Section 70 (1) (a) of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act Chapter 9:23.
This emerging pattern of young people, particularly those still in school, engaging in sex has become so widespread that many of those who ended up doing it would have been pressurised by friends, according to a Harare-based peer educator, Tariso Macheka.
“Teenagers always want to fit in with the crowd,” she said. “So if they hear their friends say they have had sex with their boyfriends or girlfriends, they might be pressurised to try it so that they are not left behind or regarded as backward.”
The unfortunate thing though, she said, was that most of the times the stories are just “imagined fables” that would never have happened.
A 16-year-old student with a Harare college who identified herself as Claire, said sex was such a heated topic among teens and there was always pressure from peers to engage in it.
“This is considered fashionable, and some girls claim to sleep with their boyfriends such that if you are not doing it, you are made to feel backward and old-fashioned,” she said.
She, however, said some of the tales were false and were only meant to tempt others to experiment with sex without considering the likely repercussions.
Macheka said peer pressure could be so strong that many young people ended up giving in.
She said one of the best ways to contain such pressures was for parents to engage in dialogue with their children over issues of sexuality so that they would not have to rely on false information.
“The current generation of young people is very sexually aware, but the problem is that the information they have is often based on falsehoods and half truths,” she said.
Today’s younger people more experimental
PASTOR Evan Mawarire of His Generation Church said young people were living in perilous times in which they had to contend with issues of sexuality that older generations never had to grapple with during their childhood years.
Mawarire runs a vibrant church programme called “Sex-posed Session”, which is held every year, drawing young people from within and without the church to discuss sexual issues that affect them in a frank, no-holds-barred manner.
Mawarire said what has come out through those sessions was that young people were more sexually aware than adults were prepared to admit, which was why most sex education subjects in schools only scratched the surface, something akin to trying to scale a slippery wall.
“Teenagers are now more aware of their sexuality and know things that will shock even their parents. The problem is that there has been no equally vigorous response from authorities to ensure that teenagers access information they require to be able to make informed choices,” he said.
“Young people are now accessing information about sex in huge volumes and in turn, it influences their thinking and behaviour.”
He said youths, some of whose drawers were littered with “sex skeletons”, tried out things based on their exposure to explicit sexual material.
New technology to blame for ‘sex-perimentation’
NEW multimedia technology has been found to fuel “sex-perimentation”.
In recent years, Zimbabwe has been grappling with the sex-tape craze following the leaking of recordings of sex involving local “celebrities” such as Tinopona Katsande and Desmond “Stunner” Chideme as well as Big Brother Africa star Pokello Nare.
There have also been several reports of people who are far from the limelight who have ended up in trouble after recordings of their “sexcapades” via mobile phones accidently leaked out of private vaults into the publicarena.
Sexual and reproductive health specialists say children are beginning to experiment with sex because they watch pornography on television, smartphones and computers, while some are led into sex through peer pressure.
Macheka said such recordings by popular stars that the younger generation regarded as their idols were enough to nudge teenagers’ curiosity to experiment with sex.
“In a way, there is such much glorification of sex through new multimedia technology, and this has also contributed to the growth of a new culture in which teens seek to try out everything sold to them,” she said.
“Youths now have access to the Internet via gadgets such as smart phones through which theyshare a lot of information and even images about sex. All thesethings influence their thinking and in the end determine their behaviour.”
A social media expert, Albert Nhokwara, said contemporary youths are bombarded with sex messages from every side.
“You can never under-estimate the power of social media in proposing, and reinforcing, ideas. Sex has become such a tradable commodity that virtually every message, particularly in the advertising industry, has sexual overtones,” he said.
Nhokwara said pornographic material, which provides only a superficial escape from reality, has become so easily accessible and many young people who come across it could easily try to experiment.
Children need information, not condoms
IN September last year, there were reports of a lobby to introduce a legal framework to support the distribution of contraceptives to “adolescents” aged between 10 and 24 under an initiative designed to curtail teenage pregnancies in schools.
The Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey had established that teenage pregnancies increased from 21% between 2005 and 2006 to 24% between 2010 and 2011.
Health and Child Care minister David Parirenyatwa, however, shot down the idea, arguing that contraceptives should never be given to those below 18 years.
“As a ministry, we do not have a policy that advocates giving contraceptives to under-age children,” he said.
But, a recent investigation carried out by our sister paper, The Standard, established Zimbabwean girls were now engaging in sexual encounters from the age of 12, a reality most parents were reluctant to admit because of the sensitivity around the thorny issue.
Mawarire said there was need to open up platforms where frank discussions on sexuality with young people who were influenced by the music they enjoyed to engage in sex.
“Young people are very experimental. If you observe the way they talk to a girl, for example, it is based on a song, on what the musician would be saying,” he said.
United Nations Population Fund programme specialist in the Strategy on Adolescents and Youth, Tamisayi Chinhengo, said comprehensive sexuality education for life planning was important.
She said young people were already acquiring information on sex from different sources so there was need to ensure that they accessed “age-appropriate, fact-based and medically accurate as well as culturally-competent” information.
She said parents should be in a position to offer their children relevant information.
She said: “Young people who are considering sexual intercourse should talk to a parent or other trusted adult about their decision and about preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.”
In October last year, the South African Constitutional Court ruled that the criminalisation of sexual conduct between consenting adolescents — provided for in Sections 15 and 16 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act — was unconstitutional.
Judge Sisi Khampepe said the sections infringed on the rights of adolescents between 12 and 16 to dignity and privacy.
The judgment declared invalid provisions of the Act that criminalised consensual sexual conduct between adolescents.
