B-Metro COMMENT: Educate teens to stem pregnancies

RECENT reports indicate that Zimbabwe is still grappling with unacceptably high cases of teenage pregnancies, with rural areas topping the list and many traditional and religious practices being singled out for being major contributory factors. With figures of more than 25 percent of under-age girls falling pregnant, there is reason to be very worried.

What is even more worrying is that in many of these cases it is older men who impregnate the naA?ve and sexually ignorant teenagers.

While in the past parents could afford to claim to be uncomfortable discussing sexual matters with their children, circumstantial pressures are rapidly and inexorably offering us very few choices. It is either we open up and teach our children or watch their future go up in smoke right before our eyes.

We have buried our heads in the sand for so long, and many of us are not even aware that our children are introduced to some of these issues in their Science classes at primary level hence their curiosity around issues of sex, that are worsened by the hormonal pressures of adolescence and the media in general.

What we have observed in many instances is that teenage mothers seldom get their lives back on track and they mostly live to regret their mistakes in later life since marriage is not guaranteed, and where they get married to an older partner, it usually results in abuse.

Elsewhere in this edition we carry a story of a man who was entrusted with transporting schoolchildren who then got into a relationship with a 14-year-old girl. His lame defence that the girl had told him that she was older is quite odd considering that he knew that this was a junior secondary school child, and above all whose parents entrusted her to him.

Even though there is nothing to suggest the girl could be pregnant, it is quite repulsive that a grown man would prey on such a young girl who is so naA?ve and impressionable that she will not be able to concentrate in class due to the excitement over sex. This is the risk that we face. If we do not give our children information about sex, foxes in sheepa��s clothes will step in and initiate them into a world that we will struggle to extricate them from.

Pregnancy is just part of the risks that the teenagers are exposed to. Due to their age many of the girls run the risk of dying at childbirth, some because they would have hidden the pregnancy and deliver in unsafe places, yet others face complications as their bodies would not have been fully developed to handle such.

There is also the risk of disease, with studies having shown that younger girls were at greater risk of HIV infection as they could not negotiate for safer sex, and that many of them were involved with older men, many of them with multiple sexual partners.

There is still also a challenge regarding child marriages among certain sects and certain areas around the country, which calls for concerted efforts by all stakeholders to spread information even within traditional and religious institutions so that we save a whole generation born of a disempowered mother, that would also be terribly disadvantaged due to limited opportunities of their parent whose education was derailed by either pregnancy, disease or death resulting from one of the two. . .