By Umaru Fofana
As I sat down in Bo to write this piece, I was shown the picture of a 10-year-old girl who went to a clinic in Blama, Small Bo Chiefdom in the eastern Kenema district. She carries a pregnancy that should be around 12 weeks old now. I cannot publish her photo because of ethical reasons. That is how bad it is!
It is obvious that child marriage or pregnancy – marrying or impregnating a girl less than 18 years old – is dangerous. Medically, socially and even economically. It can be fatal. The practice takes away from a girl her future opportunities. Where she does not die it can cause extreme health problems for her including fistula. Many of those who experience complications at childbirth are minors. A girl is neither physically strong nor mentally prepared for marriage, sex and reproduction.
Child brides go through trauma emanating from violence in their marital homes and they have to put up with sex, forcibly. Constant pain and sometimes death resulting from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth become the daily experience of girl brides. Sadly, this is the reality that many girls have had to go through and still do go through because of reasons that are as wide-ranging as the consequences are inconsequential. And unless urgent and drastic measures are taken at the highest level – without hypocrisy, without politics, without appeasement – our girls will continue to go through this apocalypse.
Adults, especially men, should have telepathic knowledge of girls. But for some Sierra Leonean men that knowledge is psychopathic. To the extent that if you think they are the answer to the plight of girls, I will ask “what is the question?” Some of these dirty old men have brought agony upon girls, caused about sadness to their parents, and planted endangerment to the broader society.
According to the demographic and health survey of the UN population fund (UNFPA), 40% of all maternal deaths in Sierra Leone, among the highest in the world, are as a result of teenage pregnancy. Child pregnancy, as I prefer to call it, is the leading cause of premature delivery, still births, fistula and unsafe abortion in the country. Almost half (48%) of married women in Sierra Leone who are aged between 20 and 24 years were given off to men when they were girls – under 18 years of age. The average in Sub-Saharan Africa is 37%.
Teenage pregnancy is the third most common reason for pupils dropping out of school in the country. One in every three pregnant women in Sierra Leone is a girl. If that is shocking then wait. 76% of teenage mothers have already been married off to men some of them old enough to be their father. Girls as young as nine years are impregnated. If the above figures do not worry you, nothing else does. And the Northern Province is the hardest hit – 60%.
Add to those figures the rampant unlawful carnal knowledge – the legal lingo for the rape of a minor. Never mind the unregulated female genital mutilation; Etc. etc. In short our girls are in trouble and if urgent steps are not taken, it will affect the current generation of girls and pose a serious knock-on effect on their future and the country’s. The ramifications are on them but also on the wider society.
The current state of teen pregnancy speaks volume about tradition, our law and how we implement it, or not. It does not portend well for the current and future generations of our girls. From early marriage to child pregnancy, we have subjected them to what they should have no business with. Peer pressure forces some girls to have sex before their body is ready for it. This has also been cited as one of the reasons for girls getting pregnant. They see it as being trendy. But the implementation of the law against those men despite the pressure of tradition and poverty can ward off their prey. So the dirty old men should be dealt with to curb this menace
With or without a free maternal health care, bringing life to this world remains a deadly enterprise for many women in Sierra Leone. We have a Child Rights Act. It is not being enforced. We have a beautiful Sexual Offences Act. It is being reduced to a toilet roll. We have some backward traditions. They are being fully put into practice. This is a clear recipe for the destruction of our daughters and the next generation of mothers. That is if they survive long and healthily enough to so be.
If anyone had thought that with the end eleven years ago of the war it would be hunky-dory for girls and their girlhood, the above is enough to make them have a rethink. Poverty and some backward traditional practices emanating from the insatiability of the libido of some shameless men in this day and age, plus the culture of silence have made Sierra Leone a part of what I would call the Axis of Cruelty to Girls.
Over the weekend I travelled to Bo in southern Sierra Leone to train some journalists. On our way to our hotel we stopped to buy corn on Old Koribondo Road. There sat a girl, certainly less than 14 years, selling corn and breastfeeding her baby. I cringed. I later asked why she was not in school. Her response is the classical one you would get across the country: My parents are poor and could not afford my schooling expenses. On why she had a baby at her age – and she was shy to tell me how old she was – she said her parents married her off when she was in primary school.
Three days later, on Tuesday this week, as I travelled back to Bo I stopped at Magbontoso/Mile 38. A girl who said she was 15 years old but looked even younger, told me she was out of school because she had her 2-year-old child to look after. Work out the mathematics and see how old – or young – she was when she got pregnant.
Sierra Leone contributes significantly to the estimated 25,000 girls who get married off every day to men mostly old enough to be their father or even grandfather. We are the worst country in all of black Africa when it comes to this. Hence the girls who should be being looked after are becoming pregnant and are forced to look after their own children.
We are a signatory to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which established that marriage should be a consensual choice. A girl cannot give her consent. Therefore marrying a girl off is against the UDHR. But the grim reality we are faced with is there for all to see.
Mbalu, not her real name, looked pale and emaciated when I stumbled on her in Kabala, northern Sierra Leone a couple of years ago on a UNICEF assignment. She would not, perhaps could not, tell me how old she was. She probably knew but was ashamed to tell me. Or she was too young and naïve to even remember her age. She appeared distraught because of something someone might have done to her. But I could not tell what or who it was apart from the pregnancy. She would not tell me either.
With her girlish looks, Mbalu must have been between 12 and 14 years. Definitely not yet 16 at the time. She carried firewood on her head from the nearby bush. So she also did a heavy pregnancy. I would later be told that she dropped out of school just after taking her primary school-leaving NPSE exams. Her parents could not pay her fees or provide other expenses needed for her education. She had to rely on someone who offered to help her get an education. It turned out she fell prey to his gimmick and ended up having sex with her. The result was the pregnancy. The matter was reported to the Family Support Unit but the relatives withdrew it from the police either out of foolish shame or some backward traditional practices which aid and abet this criminality even up to today.
In the same Kabala around the same time, ten percent of all the girls in junior secondary school at the Kabala Secondary School became pregnant in just one academic year. They dropped out of education. No-one was punished for it.
During an impressive programme in Freetown early this year, organised by the First Lady Sia Koroma, Mrs. Goodluck Jonathan from Nigeria said that young mothers and their babies “are at the disadvantages of contracting HIV/AIDS” and that when girls drop out of school they would obviously not reach their full potential.
That occasion was the launch of the “National Strategy for the Reduction of Teenage Pregnancy” in Sierra Leone which had as its slogan “Let girls be girls not mothers”. Then, President Ernest Bai Koroma made the commitment that his government “will ensure that [Sierra Leone] achieves the objectives set out by the national strategy. My ministers will be held accountable for the achievement of the strategy. I see this initiative as a good test for the capacity of all stakeholders to be able to work together, in a coordinated way and to collectively address this pervasive problem". He went on: "We must give back to teenage girls the tools for a better future, and that tool is education". In other words teenage pregnancy for whatever reason, and girls dropping out of school, would be stamped out as assured by President Koroma.
Sadly, there is no sign of that especially in rural Sierra Leone. I know it is early days yet but I would think that the right engagement at all levels would have been embarked on and not just showmanship. So the reverse keeps happening without consequence. Or is it in the psyche of men, as postulated by Virginia Wolf who says that the "history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the history of that emancipation itself." How serious are we? We are not!
The shameless rapacious orgy of assault of some men against defenseless girls is disgusting. The fact that they get away with it is even more so. Our Paramount Chief Members of Parliament, who in my view have no business in the House, should actually be coming out and talking about this because some members of their institution are most guilty of this reprehensible action especially after girls have gone through some initiation rites.
It is fair to say that some efforts are being made by the justice sector to address this. There is now a weekend court in Freetown to sit exclusively on rape cases mostly of minors. Every sexual encounter with a minor is a rape, whether she was married off or not. And the shameless men and the girls’ parents who approved of such must be prosecuted and punished. Invariably, these courts should also be encouraged throughout the provinces. In short, the “National Strategy for the Reduction of Teenage Pregnancy” should go beyond being on paper and being talked about at workshops and talk shops if our girls must be saved from the Axis of Cruelty we have carved for ourselves as a country.
"Short-changing girls is not only a matter of gender discrimination; it is bad economics and bad social policy. Experience has shown, over and over again, that investments in girls’ education translate directly and quickly into better nutrition for the whole family, better health care, declining fertility, poverty reduction and better overall economic performance", according to the UN Millennium Report. We have to make correct this wrong and cure the malaise. It is the duty of all of us, led by those chosen or elected to lead.
(C) Politico 01/08/13
