BY KEVIN MOTAROKI
Patrick came home one evening to the welcome of a shocking conversation between his two sons aged 9 and 11. He did not immediately make his presence known but from what he gathered from their hushed tête-à-tête and his interrogation of them afterwards revealed that they had picked up a condom packet on their way home from school and decided to keep it. One was asking the other to produce “the stuff” so that they could examine it, and the other, probably elder of the two, conscious of his father’s presence in the house, wanted his brother wait until they went out to play.
Nothing about the boys’ talk deviates too much from typical naughty child talk. What is shocking, however, is the fact that they understood what it was they had carried home, and why it was important that they keep that knowledge between themselves.
In a related incident, and what is, perhaps, an indictment of parenting, a video shared on Facebook – the date of posting is January – shows parents and their children at a party. At some point, a young girl, perhaps five or six, begins to dance. Excited, other children follow. Good stuff, you might say, until you see the six-year old try to ‘shake it’ with a boy, crotch thrust at her buttocks, trying to get into the groove of her gyrating, much to the delight of the parents who cheer them on, and even offer tips on how best to do it.
These two incidents came to mind when I read in the dailies reactions by parents, religious organisations, teachers and even atheists about a government plan to distribute condoms amongst teens, with each group giving its views to support this or that stand. But the most interesting one was a research that allegedly established that “10-year-olds” had they are not ready to have sex, and therefore do not need condoms.
A study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation last year revealed that the average American child spends more than 38 hours a week on video games, music, TV, reading and their computers — which is nearly the amount of time spent by an adult working a full-time job. And, the report notes that 68 percent of the material the children watch contains sexual content, up from 56 percent just two years ago. This scenario is no different from what the situation is here, particularly with the freeing of the Internet, to which more and more children are increasingly having access.
“The kind of increased sexual images that children are seeing in the media and in their toys – such as video games – has a parallel with when they get a little older,” Levin says. “They start becoming sexually active earlier.”
10-year-olds know about sex as much as the average adult, thanks to Internet porn and pirated adult movies. Despite parents’ best attempts to supervise what children see and hear, today’s children are often exposed to sexual messages through various media. Think about how you learned about sex as a child and contrast that with what happens today. When six-year-olds can sing effortlessly sing along to Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” and Britney Spears’ “Gimme More” or “Outrageous”, you know that sex is nothing new to children. It is not unusual to see kids giggling when Walden in “Two and Half Men” says to his lady friend that he wants to “go skinny diving in her grand canyon”, they, obviously know too much, especially for people trying to understand what it means to be a boy or girl.
Says Michael Ombuna, a psychologist who runs a private clinic in the city centre: “Whether or not children understand the innuendos of what they see or hear, the fact is that it is their time of discovery, and they are going to absorb all of that information. And while it might not affect them immediately, it will definitely affect their behavior patterns in future.”
A parent, Sandra Mwaura, in what is a subtle challenge, says that sexual content is so much entwined into popular music and film that it is difficult to shield children from graphic content.
“Look at the videos our children watch in the music programmes on TVs; it is just appalling. Even the so-called GE (General Audience) programmes, which are supposed to be friendly to children, have content that is hard to describe as palatable. The Kenya Film Classification Board ought to do a better job rating what is shown at different times,” she says.
From very early ages, children are exposed to sexual themes, language and actual sexual scenes through news programmes, television shows, commercials, soap operas, popular music, Internet, movies and magazines, such that even the most well-meaning of parents cannot completely protect children from society’s focus on sex and sexuality. These influences may lead naturally curious children to experiment sexually. The Internet is especially portent because it exposes children to sexual predators, even on children’s sites.
Coupled with exposure is the idea of role modelling. A four-year investigation conducted in Britain by Sir Alan Steer, a retired school head, into school discipline, claimed that abusive football stars fuelled violence in the playground while celebrity sex scandals encouraged teenage promiscuity. Sir Alan calls on parents to spend more time and less money on their children, and be prepared to say “No” more often to their demands.
But these, others may argue, are problems of the middle and upper classes. While that argument may not be necessarily true, there is one other problem that is primarily associated with the lower classes: privacy. Informal settlements, for example, do not offer the privacy needed for adults to engage in sex, such that children sometimes get to know what goes on when parents engage in sexual activities, thereby influencing their sexual behaviour.
Although most parents in informal settlements may try to protect their children from seeing them engage in sexual activity, the measures employed – waiting for the children to sleep, switching off the lights and sending the children out of the home during certain periods – are often ineffective. Sometimes, out of curiosity, children may pretend to be asleep so that they can peep when parents begin having sex, and then try to copy what they see.
Another phenomenon that seems to have picked up pace recently is house-helps using children to explore their sexual desires. More than once, we have been treated to news of maids caught on camera asking or forcing children to touch their genitalia, or perform oral sex on them. A parent was hosted at a local radio in a morning talk show, who revealed how her help had been exchanging pornographic videos and magazines with other house helps, sometime using her children. According to her, she would never have known had her son not gone to play and forgotten to deliver a pornographic magazine to a neighbour’s house.
What these incidents demonstrate is that there are numerous ways through which children can access sexual material, and the best a parent can do is counsel a child and hope they can distinguish what is appropriate and what isn’t. Wherever a child is, there are opportunities for them to get exposed to harmful sexual content, and a parent must identify these and help him/her filter out such content. Even then, having “the talk” with one’s own child is not the easiest thing a parent can do, which is why parents have asked curriculum planners to include sex education in the syllabus from an early age.
But this also underscores the need to take pre-emptive action to protect children in the event that they have already been exposed to sex or pornography, and the assumption that they may want to experiment.
However, these measures, in my view, should not include distributing condoms to pre-teenagers. Often, the power a parent wields over a child is underestimated, but through genuine involvement, parents can play a positive role in developing their children sexually.
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