Teenage girls fall pregnant to get their man

By Tando Mfengwana
09 September 2006

Poor Cape Town adolescent girls are falling pregnant in order to be financially secure with older men who can provide for financial income.

The Weekend Argus reports that the rise in teenage pregnancy came about as girls, in competition with others for the affection of a man with a steady income, fall pregnant to get the man.

The report says that the adolescent sexual and reproductive health project co-ordinator with the Planned Parenthood Association of South Africa, Vivienne Gongota spoke about how young girls as young as nine and fourteen were sexually active and how teenage boys boasted about having four or five sexual partners.

Gongota said that poverty leads these girls to seek boyfriends who can provide them with basic necessities in exchange for sex.

Gongota runs the associations Khayelitsha clinic and the peer educator programme in 24 high schools and they recently ran a wellness programme of workshops aimed at children bearing women.

The report says that Lynnette Martin, the Programme director at Oil, a skills training NGO working with schools in the South Peninsula said that they do find a lot of young girls’ immediate needs are not met at home and that they look for older guys who can provide them.

Martin said that another possible factor was the widening gap between rich and poor, leaving girls from poverty-stricken areas open to exploitation.

The national education department recently realised a report which state that one out of ten schoolgirls in South Africa drops out of school pregnant.

A statistics SA report which calculated that deaths of women between the ages 20 and 39 have increased severely between 1997 and 2004 due to the escalating prevalence of HIV.

Western Cape Lifeline/ Childline manager Laura Blake told the Argus that statistics on sexual abuse revealed that one in four children in the Western Cape suffered sexual abuse.

The provincial health department’s spokesperson Faiza Steyn said that the departments policy is not provide contraceptives to girls under the age of 14 without parental permission, but the policy is not strictly enforced.

She said that the sexual activity of young girls is a sensitive issue and that the department did not want to give the impression that they were encouraging promiscuity.

South Africa’s newly drafted Children’s Act, 2005 has lowered the consent age at which a person could get contraceptives to 12.