Why teen girls in Africa get pregnant unexpectedly

this week on the 77 street debate the law currently says if you are 14 years and younger you cannot consent to sex that statutory rape my water broke at school your water broke when you were in school yes liberalised abortion in namibia is a matter that needs the urgent of all the attention i don't think we as human beings have the right to take life women should be given the choice [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of the 77 percent this week we are in fintuk in namibia more specifically in havana the informal settlement that you see behind me and it's because statistically low-income countries are more likely to experience the problem of early pregnancies or teen pregnancies compared to high-income countries and particularly in this area you can imagine that it's a serious problem and that's why we're here and we want to find out why does this problem exist what are the consequences and what can we do to put an end to it who better to answer these questions for me than some namibians and we're going to begin with by grace she's actually looking very scared right now but that's right so by grace you're a teen mom and you made headlines here in namibia because you actually got pregnant at the age of 14. i can imagine that that was a very scary experience for you can you tell me what happened my parents had like a funeral of my grandmother and they'd go like back and forth to the village they didn't know that i had a boyfriend that time but then when they found out that i had a boyfriend that's when they started asking me questions like did you start having sex and all of that and then that's when i like became open with them and then i told them that yes i've had sex and i didn't get my period for so long and all of that and they decided that we should go for tests so we went for the tests and then they came out positive they were okay they were made obviously but they were a bit accepting yeah and the the knowing that um they had i had their backs is what kept me going right but what happened when you got the news when you knew for yourself that for sure i don't have my period and it's very very likely that i'm pregnant what was going through your mind okay um [Music] i was there it was actually a time where i was depressed and i was doing my schools at school were very weak i also kind of thought about like having abortions and all of it like i had the thought of having an abortion but i actually never like tried to maybe go to the shop or maybe look for something or go on on the internet to search and all of it so yeah so the thought crossed your mind but you opted against it how old was your boyfriend at the time by the way he was 21 i think 21 so you were a 14 year old dating a 21 year old uh let me just come to amore here for a second because she's also a teen mom albeit the fact that she got pregnant when you were 17 right did you also have an older boyfriend and is it normal in namibia to have somebody who's significantly older than you as a boyfriend when you're a teenager yeah i was having an older boyfriend he was like 25 but the reason i took all the boyfriend was like the needs to support you know dollar trees those things yeah that's why so what are some of the things that your boyfriend was providing for you just explain to me please dollar trees stationaries from school so your parents were not in a position to do this for you i imagine yes um okay and so you'd figure out that you're pregnant is it scary for you when you find out or why are you thinking oh my gosh i only found that when i was four months because i was like still getting my period and then like i was at school when my teacher it was a male teacher he told me that my breasts are big and like he wanted to take me to the clinic so i went with him to the hospital and then he called my parents but then my parents said that i must move out of the house and go and stay with my boyfriend the one that made me pregnant so i had to move but then the guy was even denying when i told him that i'm pregnant yeah he denied until the kids was after i gave birth until she was eight months that's the time he accepted the child because we went for a dna okay and have your parents taken you back in since that time yes okay um let's come to immaculate who's on this side she's a senior research fellow at the university of namibia and i just want to put things into context here is what we are hearing a familiar tale here in namibia or in the larger african context what do the figures say teenage pregnancy is indeed a serious concern globally the nambian government have what we call the education monitoring information systems where annually the schools must be able to indicate what has happened to those learners who are not returning right a significant number of the learners that are not coming back are actually due to pregnancy too early and there you can see around 40 percent 40 reasons why learners are not returning to school wow okay um i want to speak to where is he west here he is west is a traditional dancer he would consider himself a traditionalist you can see from his jewelry but you also grew up in areas like this you know in formal settlements and you're actually working with youth in these areas why is the rate of teen pregnancy so high a lot of kids are being approached by adults or maybe bigger boys yeah so this is also to get a fresh fruit from the beginning because this also this leak of saying that what do you mean a fresh fruit fresh fruit is like let me say this guys also proud of themselves and also doing the cabin amongst themselves and say that i'm proud of myself because i've been breaking maybe 15 girls of vegans or something like that so it's for us it's a joke or maybe it's a fun thing but there's even cases girl children are booked for marriage before they are even born so i mean explain that to you let me just explain that so you will be married to a rich person for benefit sometimes it means you are going to be a helping hand of that man let me say sometimes so helping her is coming like this i think i think we all know that it's almost expected that the girl will sleep with this old man yeah but it's it's it's almost like that it's also happening like that uh i feel like you're almost romanticizing this which i i have a problem with let's come back to by grace and amore here because i want to know the kind of sex education you received in school i mean by the time you're 14 what grade is that i was in great seventh grade seven so by this time teachers have already probably is it in the school curriculum what are you taught yeah we were taught about sex yes that um you should condomize and all of it and yeah family planning you should use family planning and i did have knowledge just there was just an accident that happened yeah what about you amari were you aware of you know sex education the possibilities of getting an early pregnancy and the consequences of that from school yes do you think it was enough yeah yeah so for you that it would have happened either no it was a mistake it was a mistake okay so when you know you hear the young girls here saying it was a mistake but then the consequence is a child by the way this is friday the introducer an activist here what are some of the stories that you've heard from the people you're working with most girls that usually um let me say fall pregnant or the stories that i've met are people from traditional aspects and traditionally you're taught to not sort of really refuse when a man approaches you because this man is older than you are and in the end this person ends up pregnant this person ends up even if they say that no i'm pregnant they come to their elders so what they did is they approached this uh other family and said no if you are able to take care of this child for us we will let it slide why are you literally swiping this whole thing under the med because firstly that other person is a perpetrator it's a he's a rapist you had sex with an underage child that's rape but these things are not spoken about sex is like it's a bedroom grown-up kind of thing but yet the grown-ups are the ones that are approaching these young kids because hey fresh meat is a virgin and you're going to boast about it okay we'll come back to the aspect of tradition in just a second but let me introduce simpson for a second here uh because you're a father of four and you identify as a born-again christian and so the question of having age-appropriate conversations around sex and sexuality but within the context of christianity is that happening you you get a teenage girls also getting falling pregnant in the church but that does not say they they are not informed or rather they don't get the education from from from from from from school sex education only comes in somewhere around 14 15 in schools as well but i think somewhere it needs to start from grassroots from home as well parents need to to to encourage parents need to to to to be open about this kind of things to to to their daughters and say no what about to their sons yeah to their sons as well to their sons as well teach them that there is a way to live uh virtually right and that also a way to live morally right and to wait until one of the day that you will get married okay let me come to immaculate oh i can see your itching yes um there's a notion that if that young boys are not implicated in teenage pregnancy this is that whole narrative but they are the education needs to deliberately target the young boy they need to be as much part of the solution as they are part of the problem um do you think that the education system is comprehensive enough when it comes to issues sexual education not really not really we have we have looked at the way how the extent to which the teachers are comfortable in talking about sex education to the the learners majority of them are not even prepared to take on the conversation yeah we need to step up a little in terms of the type of policies that we have in place namibia has an adolescent friendly health policy and the understanding there is that a 14 15 16 year old should be able to go into a health facility find a queue that is separate from the other queues where family planning is taken and there should be a nurse who is well trained who will be able to give this youngster comprehensive health service not just the injection or the pill or the loop okay that is not yet happening let's come back to simpson then because it ties back to what you were saying earlier that the teachings for you as a christian is abstinence until marriage don't you think that's a little misleading i mean people are having sex why don't you just give them access to contraceptives and the health care that they need yeah uh it is there is something there is something called uh self-control the bible talks about self-control a young girl being approached by a man or an older man she has the right to say no it all deals with dignity at the end of the day i'm just curious simpson because for you it seems that the message is constantly targeted at the girl the girl should be resisting the girl should not fall into his hands what about the man why can't he resist the urge to approach a younger girl the way we as parents nurture and and teach our children from from from home plays a vital role in terms of when he becomes a 16 year old or 14 year old to be able to control to be able to respect that young lady that works there in the street to be able to see her as a sister to be able to see her as a mother i think you and i could go back and forth on this because the truth is that hormonally it is very normal to have sexual desires but i do understand your point on uh control so on this side we have a new face who you might not have seen from early and dilo it's a bit late but she's here nonetheless an activist you've got something to say to me you're dealing particularly with vulnerable groups we're talking here commercial sex workers people from the lgbtqi community tell us what your experience is i totally disagree with how you have to you bring in the narrative around control knowing that we live in an in a society where power dynamics are very much pervasive power dynamics that also make those choices on behalf of other people and therefore also remove the agency of especially adolescent girls young women and gender non-conforming people so really we also need to talk about the issues around consent here let me let me ask a question to you dilo because you missed the stories earlier from by grace who got pregnant when she was 14 and amore who was 17. is it possible for them to have provided consent at that young age and for amure who was depending financially entirely on her boyfriend so according to our combating of rape act of 20 and of 2013 i think the the law currently says if you are 14 years and younger you cannot consent to sex that statutory rape and if the person is is 14 years and three years older that also you cannot consent but again we are talking about adolescence here so there is no way that the person could have consented even if they they did say yes and this and that because we are looking at power dynamics so women we cannot have that that conversation around consent consent without talking about the existing power dynamics okay great all right so i want to come back to these two ladies uh because i know one of the things that's associated with teen pregnancies at least where i'm from in kenya is shame a feeling like you did something completely wrong did this did it feel like that for you because you stayed in school until you were eight months pregnant yeah how did that go um yes shame from like thinking what will the people say what will the teachers say what will people a church say it did also um affect you yeah how did you deal with that because it's not an easy situation to be in yeah okay i had my parents number one who were encouraging me not to worry about what other people said in my life skills teacher yeah so you had a support system around you let me ask you a personal question have you grown up in the church yes i did and did you feel like at that point you could go to your pastor or your youth leader and talk to them about what was going on not really i was ashamed that maybe like someone that grew up in the church are you you've been how can you fall pregnant and yeah so yeah but you're back in school now yeah um amore you haven't been able to come back to school you're working in a tuckshop at the moment so did you have to drop out immediately you got pregnant or what happened no i went to school until i was eight months pregnant yeah i i mean yeah eight months and then like my water broke at school your water broke when you were in school yes can you talk to me through that experience i mean that must have i can't imagine were you in class were you out in the field playing we were rotating yeah we're like you know changing glasses yeah and then the weather broke okay so frida let me come back to you because back to the conversation about shame and what simpson said earlier about what the expectations of the church are what the expectations of culture are don't you feel like they rob these girls who are already in vulnerable situations of the little resources that they might help that they might have in terms of support i personally feel like or from personal experiences that i've with the people that i've had to deal with who got pregnant early ages they were most of them were shunned from the church but not because they were told that don't come to the church it's just by the looks of it and because of these things these women fall into depression and sometimes it becomes so bad that they don't go to school anymore or they just literally shut down and become depressed and i personally feel like their bodies are really not fit at 14 your body is not fair to carry to term you should be given the option of no if you want to have an abortion not even if you want to you should have an abortion because very much you're young but isn't it what does the the country's constitution say about the legality or illegality of abortions here only under three conditions if i'm speaking under correction four conditions yes contextually under the law abortion is legal so but legal only under very constrict very restrictive conditions outside of that it's criminalized which means that if you do go for back to abortion you will be arrested when you'll be fined five thousand or five years imprisonment or both now karen coming to the current steps of abortion to obtain an abortion if under the case of repo incest you need two medical practitioners and those practitioners must be performing in the namibia state hospital and then you need a third doctor that would perform the abortion so these two doctors they only issue the certificate not the performance itself if it's under also repo instead you need a certificate from a magistrate and you need to provide a good enough reason for why you did not for example report a rape case if you are a minor or under under age you need either written consent from the minister of gender from the children's court or from a parental or guardian and then also abortion can only be performed in a state hospital so i'm guessing immaculate that given what we've just heard that the number of unsafe abortions is probably on the rise just as teen pregnancies are yes and and it is difficult to get access to statistics because of the illegality or the criminalization in the event we we i'm at the university we hear a lot of stories about a pill that is in the market that girls can access we hear stories of women or young girls who bleed them themselves almost to death because these pills need to be drained in either two sequences or three sequences you drink one today and after three days you drink another one and if you don't have the money for the next one you are likely to to just not survive it it is a it is really a horrendous stories the issue of finding a way to liberalize abortion in namibia is a matter that needs the urgent of all the attention okay that that that we need to put i'm curious to hear from simpson what his views are fred i'll come back to you in just a second uh we have the ladies there who are saying that abortion should definitely be an option on the table particularly for seriously young mothers the church is very clear on this it forbids it is there no middle ground whatsoever i don't think there is a middle ground simply because uh this child if let me ask a different question if the abortion law was to be changed and made more direct how would you feel about it it wouldn't have been a good thing because i don't think we as human beings have the right to take life i mean at the end of the day we should support the mother in terms of going through this process giving the necessary guidelines that she needs to get and then if she's in in school get her back when she's done giving birth get her back to school so that at the end of the day she can be have a career and be a responsible mother okay frieda you had something to say to me earlier please go ahead um i just wanted to add on to what mr mercury said the the fact that as much as we want to not legalize abortion fully it is happening and as much as these people are buying uh or let me say women are buying tablets on the black market so to say they are also doing um home remedies because they cannot afford these things and these are things that are happening that lead to fatalities of women dying and i personally feel like women should be given the choice because um simpson said we should let women carry to term but do we actually ask these women what emotionally what have you gone through carrying this baby to term you asked an important question which i want to ask by grace the emotional toll that it takes on you to carry a baby when you're 14 and not really being ready to how was that emotionally what frida was talking about thing that really um maybe um affected me mostly emotionally was like um comments from the people maybe that's what yeah that's what made me going to school like i sometimes i felt like i don't want to go to school and yeah or go to church even to be honest like currently since i gave birth i did not really go back to church because i felt like it was like a shame to the people like yeah they'd maybe look at me in a way of like i've seen or yeah yeah what are some of the comments that people used to say to you like by grace the innocent one how did she fall pregnant and yeah yeah and because also my parents are like religious people so people were like um your parents are religious people how did that happen like how did you fall pregnant people who call themselves um christians their child their hurt like their child their child is pregnant and yeah yeah wow so they were shaming not just you but also your parents yes tell me about your life since you gave birth um okay my parents have actually been supportive and they um offered to they hired a nanny so when i go to school she takes care after school she stays um until maybe five so i can maybe rest do a few homeworks and yeah yeah okay uh immaculate obviously not everybody will have the luxury of having their parents get a nanny for them or the ability to even go back to school so what are some of the long-term consequences of teen pregnancies within the community it's total dropout and we heard from these two young panelists that are here that for for both of them there was a time that their partners had actually said you know i'm not part of it and for for majority of young girls they can't they get caught into that system where the partner just want nothing to do with the pregnancy and parents also have a tendency to continue ostracizing them by putting punitive measures on these youngers so school dropout is really for most girls the the only and i also read that incidentally people who are teen mothers are more likely to raise children who will themselves become teen parents um so let's now look at the solutions because this is a problem that is faced surely around the globe but particularly in africa and i'm very curious to know from simpson because the church obviously has a very hardened position and abstinence is not going to work i'm sorry it just wouldn't yeah um one of the solutions that we can look at is let us stand together as a nation as we say that we are a 90 percent christian nation let us stand together and when these kinds of things happen let us not shun them but support them okay and speak openly as we are i suppose uh okay let's hear from freda what do we do so that um in the next 10 20 years we don't have another 10 20 000 by graces i i personally say less legalized abortion but you can be for abortion or you can be pro-abortion but not take part in it it's a conversation we need to cater for everybody that needs because everybody needs to be happy in the end but what about uh rape victims even these like dealer mentioned earlier on these rape victims need to get consent from two physicians and another third doctor to actually just terminate these pregnancies why can't we just make it free because in the end if you don't support abortion it's fine you you don't have to uh uh encourage people to have an abortion but give other people the choice to make that for them right fantastic let's hear from west some solutions very quickly please the solution is education of sex education sex education comprehension fantastic immaculate very quickly please a lot has been said but you know what i i always really believe that um there are worst case scenarios where pregnancy takes place because of rape or incest but then there are also cases where where we really need to bring back the joy the fun the beauty of sex back into the platform so that sex can no longer be stigmatized bring it back so that those youngsters who wants to engage sexually can can apply their minds and know that i i know whatever that is there to to know let's bring back okay uh we're just wrapping up this debate and i want to hear from the two ladies here i'm sure there's some teen moms who'll be looking at you right now looking for advice or some young women who might be wanting to hear from you yeah i'm already go on i would prefer that girls take contraceptives yeah at all time but sometimes contraceptive is out of stock that's even one thing always it's not there when you go follow up it's not there so yeah thank you i like that by grace even though your um maybe your parent doesn't come to you to have like a sex conversation maybe try to go to them and talk about it and secondly also try to use contraceptives and um yeah i'm not encouraging i'm not saying you should fall pregnant but um if you do end the fourth week pregnant it's not the end of the world okay i i really like that that's actually a really positive note to end on it's not the end of the world if you do become a teen mother but most importantly going back to what people were saying education is key and making sure that these conversations are happening out in the open as usual thank you so much for watching [Music]

Channel: DW The 77 Percent

Views: 18,815

Keywords: DW, DW Africa, Africa, The 77 Percent, African youth, Edith Kimani, Namibia, teenage pregnancy, pregnancy, teenage mum

Id: 3EIKYBREJEw

Length: 25min 57sec (1557 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 16 2022