Call to end taboo against Ameru teen mothers
A teenage mother with her baby. Among the Ameru, girls who give birth before marriage are mostly condemned and treated as outcasts.
What you need to know:
- Teenage mothers have to remain at their fathers’ homes or get married to aged family men as second or third wives.
- Sometimes pregnant girls are thrown out to go look for the boys or men who impregnated them.
Like many African communities, the Ameru, who mainly occupy Meru and Tharaka Nithi counties, have been a patriarchal society. Men are highly revered.
Here, girls who give birth before marriage are mostly condemned and treated as outcasts. They have to remain at their fathers’ homes or get married to aged family men as second or third wives. Sometimes pregnant girls are thrown out to go look for the boys or men who impregnated them. Some end up on the streets.
The Ameru still struggle to end these retrogressive cultural practices against women, including female genital mutilation, which is deep-rooted and the main cause of girls dropping out of school, teenage pregnancies and early marriages.
Tharaka Nithi Woman Representative Susan Ngugi now seeks to break the taboo. Born and brought up in the Tharaka community, an Ameru sub-ethnic group, she has witnessed many cases and now says enough is enough.
As a remedial measure, Ms Ngugi is sponsoring education for all teen mothers who dropped out of school but are willing to resume and complete their education.
Beneficiaries
So far, five teen mothers have gone back to school, some in primary and others in secondary and Ms Ngugi is still appealing for more.
“Teen mothers should not be condemned and treated as outcasts, they should be loved and given a second and even third chance to go back to school and complete their basic education,” Ms Ngugi said at Kianjuki Primary School in Maara, where she also launched construction of three classrooms at a cost of Sh4 million through the National Government Constituency Development Fund.
During the meeting attended by Mwimbi residents, Ms Ngugi sponsored back to school a teen mother of two who dropped out of Form Two aged 15, and another one who left in Grade Six aged 13 after giving birth. She urged teachers and other learners to embrace and accommodate the teen mothers who resume school and not stigmatise them.
She said the teen mothers who return to school work hard and most of them shine and become influential people in society because they had already experienced suffering and neglect.
She also holds that encouraging and supporting teen mothers back to school will reduce prostitution in towns and marketplaces. She adds that the move will also reduce the number of street children dumped by teen mothers from disadvantaged families.
Reducing prostitution will also curb the spread of HIV, which is rampant among people who sleep with multiple partners to earn a living.
At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when schools were closed, at least 400 cases of teenage pregnancies, mostly secondary schoolgirls, were reported in Tharaka Nithi County. Most of them were impregnated by their age-mates, making it hard to take legal action against the minors.
The lawmaker has asked administrators to ensure adults who impregnate schoolgirls are prosecuted and not handled by elders.
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