Teenage Pregnancy in Kenya amongst school going girls has become a worrying trend. Young girls drop out of school due to pregnancy and may not continue with their education.
Teenage pregnancy refers to girls becoming pregnant when in either primary school or high school, basically below 18 years of age.This means they have to drop out of school to first take care of themselves and the baby when it is born.These cases of early teenage pregnancy in Kenya have diverse effects not only to the individual but also the community as a whole.
This causes include:
Peer pressure
Most young people trust their peers and are easily influenced to engage in sexual encounters as a way of belong to a group. This may not be spelled out as a ritual but is expected of every member of the group. This is one of the main factors leading to increased cases of teenage pregnancy in Kenya.
Rape
Teenage girls are the most abused age group of women. Rape at this age is in most cases by a person who the girl trusts. This can be a male relative, including biological fathers and step fathers, teachers and domestic workers.
Cultural Practices
Some communities in Kenya marry off young girls from age 10 to men old enough to be their parents. At this tender age, these girls have not being exposure to any form of sexually education and have no clue of what their husbands expect from them. They become baby making machines, so why won’t this be a major contributor to increased cases of Pregnancy in Kenya.
Broken families
Lack of a stable family structure push the girls to look for security else where and this is when they get lured in relationships which have devastating effects on their lives.
Poverty
Due to poverty, girls are forced by their parents to sell their bodies as a source of revenue for the family, just to cater for their basic needs.
Lack of sexual awareness
There is a big difference between the society we were brought up in and the current society in terms of sexual awareness.When I was growing up, sex education was a taboo, we could not talk about it in public not even in schools and neither at home. So most of us were not taught about the changes our bodies were going through not until we joined high school and during biology class that we understood our bodies. This is why majority of us now as parents will not talk to our children about sex and leave them to be educated by media and their peers. This leads to experimenting, so why won’t cases of Pregnancy in Kenya be on the increase.
Abuse of alcohol and drugs
Young people are abusing drugs rampantly and of course this will increase the sexual activities. This is a major contributor to increased cases of under age and unwanted pregnancies.
This a burden all of us as members of the society have to bear, why can’t we be our sisters keeper. We have sisters, daughters, nieces and grandchildren who need us to enlighten them on the dangers of engaging in sexual activities.
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