Last week, Sunday World told the story of girls in their thousands, some as young as 12 years old, falling pregnant by men old enough to be their fathers and getting infected with HIV.
It was a tale of immoral men taking advantage and lusting after young girls from poor households who they entrapped in transactional but criminal sexual relationships.
The law is clear that having sex with under-age children is a crime that behoves those in the know to report it to the authorities.
In our reportage of the prevalence of teenage pregnancy in Nkandla, a region of northern KwaZulu-Natal, we told of how parents, holding on to promises these violators of children sell them, refuse to press charges of statutory rape.
Such action lets perpetrators walk away scot-free, usually exacerbating the situation in poverty-stricken households, which later find themselves with an extra mouth to feed once the natural course of such relationships plays out.
It’s a vicious cycle with little prospect of escape for the family and the children.
Today, we are again publishing a similar story, this time from another part of the country, of children, some as young as 10, falling pregnant with the slight difference being that it is not at the hands of older men but by children their peers.
It speaks of a need for effective education and other methods of persuasion if we are to stem the tide and not raise a whole generation wholly dependent on the state courtesy of child grants.
In telling the Nkandla story we mentioned the advice, or more appropriately, a warning and reminder social activist and researcher Lisa Vetten had for those in the lives of under-age children caught in the webs of deceit of these predatory, perverted men that they are required by the law to report cases of statutory rape.
Ditto health practitioners who come into the picture when they are required to provide medical treatment to the under-age mothers.
One such medical practitioner mentioned how they were often required to operate on the pre- or early teen mothers whose pelvic muscles had not developed enough to give birth naturally.
Police lamented that their hands were tied because often parents refused to lay or press on with charges involving minors.
We doubt that, given sheer lack of information, especially for uneducated people in rural areas, the parents involved are willing participants in the violation of their own flesh and blood, which would render them nothing better than callous human traffickers, who turn around and blame the dire economic circumstances in which they find themselves.
We are of the view that the state can do much better than it is currently doing, leaving children at the mercy of circumstances beyond even their parents’ control.
We need both the carrot and the stick to get better results.
In short, punish those in the wrong and educate the young to make better, educated choices.
