By Kemo Cham
Despite the enactment of relevant laws and intense campaign, teenage pregnancy remains rife in Sierra Leone.
Campaigners have been looking for answers, and they say poverty is the overriding factor, intertwined with a horde of others. These were the subject of discussions by local and traditional authorities from some of the most affected communities in the country recently.
The ‘Community Stakeholders’ Dialogue Meeting on Commitments to Help Reduce Teenage Pregnancy and Early Marriage’, convened towards the end of March, was designed to solicit views from those who deal with the issue on a daily basis. It’s part of the Health Systems and Services Strengthening Porgramme, known by its French acronym PROSSAN.
The participants were primarily village headmen, tribal heads and ward councilors from the Western Area Rural and Urban districts.
Mariatu Kamara, Councilor of Ward 441, sums up the feeling among participants at the first of two separate sessions.
“All the problem lies on us, parents,” she says at the conference hall of the Council of Churches of Sierra Leone where the first event was held on March 24.
In Sierra Leone, teenage pregnancy is tied to early marriage. According to Unicef, as of 2017 the country had the 19th highest rate of child marriage in the world, with 13% of girls married by age 15, and 39% by age 18. The same data show that 28% of girls and young women aged 15–19 have a child or are pregnant, and 22% have had sex with a man at least ten years older than them.
This reality poses far-reaching health and socioeconomic problems for Sierra Leone. It is notably a major contributor to the country’s high rate of maternal and infant mortality.
The PROSSAN project, which started in January 2020 and ends December 2021, is jointly implemented by a consortium of organizations, including FOCUS 1000. Its objective is to bring reproductive health services closer to the people much in need of them. It also seeks to influence community stakeholders to improve on access to these services.
The project covers 22 communities, nine in the Western Area Rural and 13 in the Western Area Urban, the two largest districts in the country in terms of population size.
PROSSAN is divided into three components: Training on HIV and other reproductive health issues; Community engagement; and Advocacy. FOCUS 1000 handles the advocacy component, under which the March sessions were convened.
As the deliberations suggest, at the heart of all it is poverty, which forces some parents and foster parents to encourage their girl children into illegal sexual relationships for financial benefits.
But in some cases it is also political, wherein lawmakers and councilors are reluctant to act, for fear of going against families’ wishes and thereby losing support. This has encouraged the act of compromise of cases of sexual and gender based violence, which is a crime under the Sexual Offenses Law of Sierra Leone.
Campaigners also say lack of political will to enforce the laws has contributed to it.
Some of the blame is also reserved for the local chiefs and religious leaders, who are usually the first point of reference. They can kill a case if they are not strong enough to resist temptation to inducement. But where the local authority summons enough courage to deal with a case by the book, it can die at the police station, where protracted delay in investigations often cause the victims to resort to the easy way out – out of court settlement.
In some cases the girls are in on it on their own accord. And the feeling can be so strong sometimes that the victim becomes an accomplice of the perpetrator, like with a case Section Chief Pa Almamy Kebay of Kamayama, in the west end of Freetown, handled a few years ago. The victim’s family had reported a matter of teenage pregnancy to the local authorities. When the police attempted to detain the alleged perpetrator, the girl offered herself to be locked up along with him, in protest.
“We couldn’t do anything about it because she was pregnant and we were concerned about the implication on her,” Chief Kebay recalled.
The sessions also included orientation on the relevant laws protecting children against abuse, primarily the 2019 Amended Sexual Offenses Act and the 2007 Child Rights Act.
Despite the existence of these laws, albeit their shortcomings, campaigners say failure to fully implement them is contributing to the problem. And this, says Councilor Aminata Gibril Sesay of Ward 437, needs serious monitoring. She says the fact that girls themselves seek to attract the men needs to be looked into.
Sesay, a health worker herself, is also concerned about how health workers treat cases needing medical opinion, which, according to her, calls for closer monitoring of health facilities by community stakeholders.
Many of the participants also lamented how provisions in the Child Rights Act limit their abilities as caregivers and local authorities to control their children. While they face accusations of presiding over the culture of compromise, the chiefs also say neglect by the central government has rendered them voiceless.
Chief Alhaji Almamy Turay of Hill Cut Community appeared to speak the minds of his fellow chiefs when he said lack of support from government had left them powerless, to a point that their voices no longer mean anything even to their subjects.
“Society should go back to the past, when chiefs were revered,” he says.
Freetown’s perennial water crisis is also a major causer of teenage pregnancy. Women, who usually provide water for the family in most households in Sierra Leone, trek long distances in search of water. Sometimes they venture out at odd hours, when they encounter unscrupulous men who take advantage.
In the words of Prince Abubacarr Williams, there is even a popular slogan about this: “Wata for wata”, which means sex for water.
Mr Williams, who represented the Chief of Thunder Hill, one of the most socially deprived communities in Freetown, says women and girls sometimes are forced to stay outdoors up to 2am in search of water.
“Most of our children get impregnated while searching for water. It is high time we engage children themselves because most cases involve kids impregnating kids,” he notes, stressing the need for more public education in such hard-to-reach communities.
Another consensus among the participants was the view that the main cause of teenage pregnancy are the mothers, who connive and often help their girl children hide their dubious activities from the male parents.
Sometimes the victim or her family would lie that she is over age, thereby preventing any action against the suspect. This tactic is mostly used wherein the parties want out of court settlement.
According to Sierra Leonean laws, a person can only give consent at 18 years.
Councilor Robert Brown, Deputy Chairperson of the Western Area Rural District Council, says tackling SGBV boils down to the functioning of available structures, which he believes is lacking. Society, he adds, must also end the culture of taboo for parents to discuss sex with their kids.
“In this situation, the child is poised to learn from outsiders and that’s bad,” Mr Brown says. “Society will be at peace when mothers treat their daughters like their sisters and fathers treat their sons like their brothers in terms of advising them.”
Councilor Brown also calls for harmonization of relevant laws to resolve discrepancies that limit powers of parents and local authorities.
“If one law prohibits sex with kids and another one allows it due to cultural practices, then there is a problem,” he says.
The issue of teenage pregnancy became a huge debate in Sierra Leone post-2014-2016 West African Ebola epidemic, after about 14, 000 girls were impregnated during lock downs. The debate ensued when the government invoked a controversial policy that prohibited pregnant girls from attending classes, affecting 11, 000 girls.
Although the policy has been reversed by the current administration, the debate exposed the deep-seated division in the Sierra Leonean society as to how to deal with the issue of teenage pregnancy.
The ban was the subject of an international legal battle championed by rights campaigners, who say the girls were been punished as victims of the failures of the government itself.
Among recommendations of the judge in the case which was heard at the ECOWAS Community Court in Nigeria were for the government to put in place measures including social programmes to address increased numbers of teenage pregnancies and to sensitize communities against discrimination. These are some of the issues PROSSAN entails.
Mballu Tommy, the PROSSAN project manager at FOCUS 1000, says one thing that came up clearly from the discussions was the need for community engagement. And she notes that the emphasis by chiefs on the supposed hindrances of human rights further enforces the need for engagement.
“There are a lot of laws, yet the issues are still in the communities. And from the discussions, I have seen the reasons,” she says.
Foday Sawy, Resource Mobilization Consultant at FOCUS 1000, agrees. He says the solution to the whole problem is within the communities.
“The stakeholders proved well informed on the issues,” he says.
“From all what was said, the one major solution is to engage and formulate centralized by-laws that can be implemented across the country to prevent people from escaping justice.”
The author is the National Coordinator of the Kombra Media Network.
Copyright © 2021 Politico Online (19/04/21)
