daniel chigunwe
At least 680 girls between 10 and 14 fell pregnant in Zimbabwe in the first half of last year, that being the number who came to the notice of the Ministry of Health and Child Care although there were probably some extra who never sought medical attention or whose family blocked medical attention.
This statistic gives an indication of just how serious the problem is. The pregnancies are a marker; there are in addition all the girls of that age who were raped or seduced who did fall pregnant, so we probably have a total of several thousand.
Under-age sex builds up after 14. The Ministry statistics showed that 51 376 girls aged between 15 and 19 went for ante-natal care, and again almost all doctors and many other people consider these girls were too young to become mothers. That particular age group encompasses girls as young as 15 or 16, where pregnancy is a serious medical risk.
While Zimbabweans aged 18 and over can legally give their consent to sexual relations, there are obviously pregnant 18-year-olds who were not legally capable of consent when they fell pregnant, and so it is likely that up to two thirds of the girls and young women in the 51 376 pregnancies were abused to have fallen pregnant.
The question arises as to who the fathers were. In some cases it is another child of roughly the same age and there has been some untoward sexual experimentation. In many other cases it is an older male, and here the HIV infection statistics give a guideline.
Among the 10-14-year-olds 0,1 percent were infected with HIV. It is exceptionally unlikely that a boy of that age will be infected, so we have evidence that older boys and adult men are involved. When we reach the 15 to 19-year-olds, with a HIV infection rate of almost 10 percent, we can start assuming a lot more adult men are involved. Teenage boys are infected, but at much lower rates than teenage girls, suggesting that far too older men are involved with teenage girls.
Prosecutions in courts are few and far between, unfortunately, but those that do make it to court show that we do have cases of older men becoming involved with teenage schoolgirls, or raping these girls.
Using the pregnancy statistics is useful as these get through the very serious underreporting and the tolerance, or even connivance, of families when it comes to attaching their young daughters to a wealthy man. A few pregnancies are not reported, and we had that dreadful case of a 15-year-old dying at a shrine three years ago with an unreported pregnancy, but generally they are and cannot be hushed up.
So the problem of young people, some primary schoolchildren, becoming involved in sexual relations of some sort is understated and is a more severe problem than many may have thought.
Zimbabwe has tightened up with the minimum age of marriage set at 18 in the Constitution and the Marriages Act, meaning that only an adult can be married and that no one else except the couple can give consent or refuse consent.
But we know that while traditional chiefs and other authorities will enforce that law, there are many unregistered customary unions, with these proliferating as many Zimbabwean couples wanted both a customary union and a church wedding and that was the only way around the division until the new Marriages Act finally connected the two types of marriage.
Anecdotal evidence, and evidence given in court, suggests that there are still families and communities prepared to accept, or even press for, underage marriages, usually of a teenage girl and an adult man prepared to pay lobola promptly. Besides that, we have the general age-old problem of men with some money and possessions targeting teenage girls for a dalliance.
The changes being made to the criminal code at the moment will raise the age of consent to 18, which in effect is at following Constitutional Court judgements, but giving the Prosecutor General some discretion when the couple involved are separated by less than three years.
This takes into account the pair of 17-year-old neighbours getting carried away, which is not desirable but not really the subject of a court case. At that level, some counselling is probably required, though.
But there will be within that three-year range plenty of cases where the Prosecutor General may well have to take someone to court because it has gone beyond a couple getting carried away or experimenting and there is something a lot nastier. All this will require better and detailed investigation as well as police and social welfare officers who can get to the truth.
The statistics also show the need for more counselling, and the need to maintain our education programmes over avoiding HIV infection. The figures from last year showed roughly 1 000 pregnant teenagers a month were infected, so the actual rate was clearly a lot higher.
But at least with the pregnancy statistics we are getting some hard data on a most underreported problem and we can use this better information to launch criminal investigations, to improve counselling and to get through to those teenagers who want to experiment than waiting until they are adults.
Online Reporter