X-Rated Childhood
on Anthony Lovat in Bolgatanga (Ghana), 18/Sep/2010 22:03, 34 days ago
Sex with children is a difficult topic to address but, in a typically direct Ghanaian style, the nurse, who had introduced herself as‘Grandma’, didn’t pull any punches when addressing the hundred or so 12 to 16 year-old girls who were assembled on wooden benches in the dusty dining hall.“You must be careful not to accept gifts from older men – especially strangers,” she barked. “If they give you something, they will want something in return. They will want to have sex with you. Do not be alone with that man. He might rape you. It is your human right not to have sex if you don’t want it. It is your human right not to be raped.”I was helping to run the five-day regional girls’ camp. Junior high school girls from across the Upper East region were attending. I now have a polo shirt that has “Girls Camp 2010” emblazoned across the back. I’m unlikely to wear it out and about in England – people might think I’m a paedophile.I read an article in the Guardian weekly recently saying how some of the most popular porn sites on the internet show old men with very young looking girls and the disclaimer that all models are over eighteen. Many men like young girls. Many young girls like older men. I know from experience that many (incidentally quite attractive) school girls try to flirt with young male teachers– something I know some male teachers enjoy. The law tries to draw a line across what our society deems acceptable – therefore the age of consent is set at sixteen, the age at which you can take part in pornography is eighteen and teachers are not allowed to have sexual relations with their students. These laws give the impression that what is morally acceptable is clear cut and easy to define.Ghana inherited many laws from colonial times– laws based on what was deemed acceptable in 1950s British society. We may believe these codes of conduct to be universal but, as with so many things in Ghana, this is proved wrong. The law does not reflect the reality within society.Men must traditionally pay a dowry to marry a girl in Ghana– a dowry that will go to the girl’s family, specifically the father. It is a tradition that is going strong across all levels of society and the dowries can be significant. For a farmer in the rural communities, I heard on the radio yesterday, a dowry of between ten or twenty cows is consideredstandard. When each cow is worth at least £150, this is serious money to someone living in poverty. Families therefore stand to make significant money from their daughters. This dowry can be maximised by a daughter having an education – a significant factor in encouraging girls to attend basic school. It can also be maximised by ensuring your daughter is a virgin. Men value virginity, purity, youth. Girls can therefore be married when they are very young – fifteen is not uncommon.Compared with the rest of the animal kingdom, human beings have an unusually long preparation time before reaching sexual maturity. This is due to the amount of learning that must take place in order to integrate into human society as a reproductive adult. Girls, on average, reach their peak fertility around the age of eighteen (compared with chimps at fourteen or fifteen). For most of human history, this has been the age at which most human women have become mothers.Despite everyone worrying about teenagers growing up too quickly in Britain, I would say that innocence and childhood lasts for far longer in Britain than it does in Ghana. Children in Britain often have few responsibilities until they are eighteen. We, as a society, struggle to maintain their innocence– we ban them from driving, from sex, from driving, from voting, from drinking, from smoking. We try to protect them from the big bad world. Not so in Ghana. Children are working as soon as they can walk – farming, washing, sweeping, collecting water, sewing, carrying. They have serious responsibilities, such as care for younger siblings, by the age of nine or ten. Girls must be able to cook a full repertoire of dishes independently by the age of eleven or twelve. By thirteen, many children are expected to earn money for their families – we see them in the lorry park, hauling goods on their heads for small coins. At around this age, they are often expected to be able to ride a motorbike. By the age of fourteen, Ghanaian ‘children’ have more responsibilities and worries than many British ‘adults’ in their twenties. By the age of fifteen, many Ghanaian girls are, quite naturally, worrying about marriage and children of their own. Their family may be eager to collect a dowry. By eighteen, the age at which female human beings have evolved to reach their reproductive peak, many Ghanaian women are teenage mothers – responsible, mature adults. Is this unnatural?There is also pressure on men to marry. Culture married his wife, who is now nineteen years old, nearly three years ago. Culture was nearly thirty and people were starting to laugh at him– teasing him for not being married. The pressure on men is different, however. The man is expected to be the provider, to earn the money, to be the breadwinner. It’s not always easy – Culture’s wife demands money for good food, clothing, a bicycle, a TV, a DVD player, a kitchen area in thehouse, her ‘business’ (she buys bras and knickers in Togo to sell in Bolga market). It’s not unlike desperate housewives – the women in the community are all quite competitive to look and live a certain way. When people live so close to one another, it appears to encourage more ‘one-upwomanship’, not less. This societal pressure on men comes later in life. Men, I have been told, tend to get married around the age of thirty.‘Grandma’ continued with relish, loudly throwing her voice at the girls and bouncing it around the echoey hall like a weapon. “You must respect your teachers but do not let them touch you. If a teacher tries to touch you then you must run away and tell someone. Tell the police – even if thepolice don’t do anything, the teacher will not try and touch you again.”In England, a massive fear amongst male teachers is to be accused of touching a child. Any accusation results in an immediate suspension pending an investigation and will go on your permanent record– even if subsequently proved false. You career is ruined. A big part of teacher training is how to protect yourself from such accusations: never be alone in a closed room with a child (their word against yours), never be in a closed room with two children (both their words against yours), never leave the eye line of your class when disciplining a student outside the classroom etc. I have been trained and conditioned in my career, along with every other British male teacher, to fear sexual accusations. This situation has come about because teachers are in positions of power and can use thatpower to take advantage of attractive young girls if the opportunity arises.“Men will lie to you,” ‘Grandma’ continued, sweating with passion, “even your teachers. They will tell you all sorts of things to make you have sex with them. Do not believe them. If you do not have sex with them, you will still grow up to be healthy.”A survey of 351 Ghanaian students, published by Plan International in March 2009, showed that 14% of individuals aged between ten and seventeen had been sexually abused at some point in their lives– over half of this abuse took place in school. Recommendations from the report included raising awareness of the issue – something ‘Grandma’ was endeavouring to do at the regional girl’s camp. This survey, however, took place in the south of Ghana and I have a nagging suspicion that the situation is worse here in the north. Take, for example, the conversation I was having with a group of male senior high school teachers recently. They were sat, as usual, under a tree discussing the daily news. It was a laddy atmosphere – teasing and joking with one another. One of the teachers read from the newspaper that a teacher in a different area of the country had been prosecuted for having sex with a nine year-old girl. All the teachers agreed that having sex with a nine year-old is disgusting. The teacher, they all agreed, should have waited a few years before having sex with the girl – at least until she is fourteen or fifteen. At least, they said quite openly, until her breasts had developed.I was talking some months ago with a British volunteer teacher at a senior high school in Upper West. He told me how an NGO had come to educate the teachers in his school about acceptable sexual practice and about child abuse. Many of the teachers were unhappy, he told me. They moaned after the NGO workers had left and argued that teachers are so underpaid that they need incentives to work. One of the perks of the job, they told him, is to have sex with some of the more attractive students.I have been told stories of girls being excluded from school for becoming pregnant. If it transpires that a teacher is the father, the teacher is usually expected to pay some compensation to support the child and is transferred to a different district. The girl will not be reinstated in school. Apparently it happens all the time.The girls were listening to‘Grandma’ attentively. Some were taking notes. “There was a senior high school teacher in Bolga who raped a girl in his school last term.” She wagged her finger at the girls, eyes bulging in sincerity. “He told her that she would fail her exams if she didn’t have sex with him.”This, I have been told, is a big problem in Ghana– women sleeping their way to the top grades in school and in university. This not only constitutes a form of abuse in itself, but makes it all the more difficult for girls to be recognised for honest academic achievements – others don’t believe they have gained their qualifications by merit alone. I have found myself doing this. At a gathering of recently graduated young people, leaving university to embark on their national service, I couldn’t help but notice a group of heavily made-up girls wearing criminally short skirts. They were skulking near the back of the hall looking grumpyand uninterested in the conference, passing notes to each other and fiddling with their mobile phones. They looked like the prostitutes we saw in Accra. Maybe, I thought, they got their grades thanks to all the time they spent with their lecturers after hours. Whether this is true or not, the fact that I might have thought this of them demonstrates how ingrained this attitude is towards qualified women. It’s an attitude that plagues them throughout their careers. The African Women Lawyers Association conducted a survey of female professionals in Ghana in 2005. They found that, of the 789 responses, 63% of women had experienced “some form of sexual harassment in the workplace and at educational institutions”.It has been a problem for many of the single female VSO volunteers working in Ghana– men they have to work with act in a way that would be completely unacceptable and, indeed, illegal in Britain. They leer and touch and offer presents, love and marriage but this behaviour is considered socially acceptable, even by married men. Sexual harassment, as defined by a British woman, isconsidered playful banter by most people.Once again, law does not reflect Ghanaian reality. When the law has been produced in a different society and in a different context, it becomes meaningless and ineffectual. Communities are therefore left to rely on themselves and not the state to judge what is and is not morally acceptable and how to deal with the perpetrators. Many communities do not act in the way their former colonial masters, NGOs and the Ghanaian government want– punishment for stealing a cow in rural Ghana is far worse than for having sex with a fifteen year-old.The hundred participants at the regional girls’ camp were adorable – they loved everything we did for them. They even loved crowding around a grainy old TV with sound quality so bad it needed commentary from the girl-child officer. The video showed a cartoon of Sara, a Kenyan girl, who says “no” to a dirty old man trying to give her a present. The dirty old man tries to catch Sara to have sex with her but she runs off and her friends, including a monkey, attack the man. The children, all of them, giggled happily at the fuzzy image of a fat man trying to shake off the monkey. It was so cute – British children would not be able tocomprehend how such a poor quality TV programme could be considered entertaining. British children get to watch the cartoon channel in 3D. Children here rarely get to watch TV, however, and ‘Ghana TV’ doesn’t show cartoons anyway. They rarely get attention or stimulation. There’s little time to play and have fun. They have to work. They have to study. They have to negotiate the dirty world of sex.Ghanaian girls have to grow up so quickly.