Don’t Celebrate with Pregnant Girls in Schools
- Category: Gender
- Date 05-02-2006
- 406 views
A three-decade law banning pregnant girls from attending school has been scrapped by Zanzibar Parliament. Prior, girls under 18 who became pregnant had to drop out of school and could not return, a law which women's groups had been campaigning to abolish, saying it infringed on the girls' human rights.
It is true that education is a basic right for every child of school going age, more or less like food, shelter and clothing. It is the weapon with which societies fight ignorance; therefore poverty and disease. No one has a right to do wrong however, and one hopes that we shall soon not see young women with protruding bellies straddling school compounds in Zanzibar.
On the contrary, to exclude school age children from education is very counterproductive, no matter what crime such a child might have committed. Whether they have grossly misbehaved by getting an early pregnancy does not qualify them for such offensive punishment as condemning them to eternal illiteracy. To punish the girls in this manner is to punish the entire nation because the effects of illiteracy and ignorance can never be limited to an illiterate individual but the whole community they belong to.
Adolescence is an age of uncertainty. Most school girls who become pregnant are largely affected by adolescence which makes them emotionally unstable, easily impressed, and consequently exploited. My firm belief is that there is no girl who gets excited to be pregnant prematurely, moreover while still in school. An early pregnancy often comes as an accident – resulting from a “stray bullet”, if you like!
Another ingredient of adolescence pregnancies is the reality of sexual abuse. These young girls are not really sexual offenders; they are victims of rampaging old, married men and cunning young boys who take sexual encounter for pleasure and adventure. The pregnant schoolgirls must accurately be understood as victims who deserve both sympathy and justice other than punishment. And to shut someone out of school is no small punishment as it condemns the individual to illiteracy which automatically leads to poverty and underdevelopment.
It should be understood that for developing countries to break the crust of underdevelopment and launch into prosperity human resources must be improved first, and there is no better way of doing so than through education. To subject a significant part of a country’s population to “punishment” that enhances underdevelopment is not a wise act at all.
This is not to discredit the past regimes that tolerated the defunct legislation. Such a “punishment” might have been prompted by the desire to instil discipline and impart values and morals in the young members of society. However, it could have been done more positively by sponsoring life skills education for children in and out of schools, which effort could perhaps not be purely effective and successful, but could bring a few good changes.
For example, young boys and girls would be educated on the value of respecting and preserving themselves by boosting their own personal self-esteem. This they could do through nurturing the component of peer resistance among the young. Peer resistance is a person’s conscious effort to withstand the coercive forces from peers to go along without thinking about the possible consequences. Young girls should be able to know and uphold the values of society, and learn to sustain their principles without apologies.
Skills training development should also tackle friendship formation, whereby children learn to make relationships that give health and meaning to the parties involved, as opposed to relationship that breed problems and regrets. Lack of skills to form positive relationships makes children of all sexes vulnerable as they may engage in dangerous associations, leading to detrimental behaviour including drug and sexual abuse.
The Zanzibar leaders and advocates must not celebrate therefore but embark on sponsoring critical thinking development programmes for children so that they are able to always think through issues and make health promoting choices. This also involves enhancing their ability to delay short-term gratification by weighing it against long-term pain.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen