Sorry for the long break o guys! I’ve gone back to school and I’m miles away from my boyfriend so I have not been having any sex to blog about lately! Lol.
So, has your teacher hit on you before? In high school, we had a tutor, let’s call him ‘Mr’. Mr was very hot, charming and an actor in a popular series on GTV (Ghana Television) in the early 2000s. I’m sure you can guess that when the lights went out in our dormitories,we girls were all fantasizing about Mr! But we knew that despite our fantasies,Mr wasn’t going to date us or anything. I mean, we all knew that Mr wasn’t into little girls. In fact, he hardly talked to any girl in the school except one girl but she was his cousin so that was why. Or was that why? We came back from one midterm to find our school ripped by a scandal. Turns out that the girl wasn’t Mr’s relative after all. Indeed, the only relationship they had was a sexual one. Yup, he had been screwing her all this time and the ‘cousin thing’ was a cover-up to enable him hang out with her. Our school authorities never said anything about it but Mr was quietly sacked. The girl continued in our school where the other students treated her like a leper. ‘Ugh’, we said, she screwed her teacher can you imagine that? Now, I get sad when I think about all this because she was only 16.
Avon Global Center (headquarters at Cornell University) has launched a report which states:
“…in Zambia, many girls are raped, sexually abused, harassed and assaulted by teachers and male classmates… the prevalence of physical and sexual abuse against women and girls in Zambia is extremely high …girls encounter sexual abuse in all areas of life in Zambia“.
In conducting this study, the researchers traveled to Zambia twice and spoke to girls in 3 schools.The report has received mixed reviews. Some people have lauded it as revealing the true situation in all African countries. Others have said that it makes a lot of generalizations and reinforces the stereotype of Africans being barbaric. What do YOU think? Fab report or stereotype gone bad? Did your teachers sexually harass you or your classmates in school?
15 comments On Has your teacher hit on you before?
I knew a teacher who sexually harassed some of my friends in primary school! Primary school o! He sent for me a few times but i dodged him like a plague cos i had heard stories. No one ever really reported(not that i know of). A few girls said he’d mainly squeez their asses and boobs. I cant understand that. These were 10yr old girls!!
In high school some male teachers made advances at girls.. Some subtle, some agressive i think this crap happens everywhere. We africans should try not to see these studies and reports as “reinforcing the stereotype of africans being barbaric” and instead work towards a solution.
P.S
Ekuba, missed you small o.
@ Ozohu: Girl, i’ve missed you and the puff of smoke that you keep blowing into my screen! lol. Hmm, sweetheart, i’m with you. i mean, i’m a victim of sexual abuse so i know that it definitely happens in africa. BUT as someone in the human rights field, i find that the west’s approach to human rights issues in africa is often condescending, superficial and rife with generalizations. I understand that sexual abuse of kids is a challenge in Zambia as it is in other parts of the world. But I refuse to believe that ,my African brothers are mostly brutes who rape their pupils. Sexual abuse is a problem everywhere! Don’t write a report about how it is ‘extremely high’ in Zambia when we all know (through the news) how some fathers have been having several kids with their own daughters in Austria and how some coaches (sandusky) have been molesting children.Sexual abuse is not a problem reserved to Zambia alone. I refuse to believe that that 90% of Zambian male teachers are beasts who jump on their pupils, but that is the sense I get from reading the report. And if you really want to tackle sexual abuse in Zambia don’t fly into the country twice, live in a hotels, speak to girls in 3 schools and make conclusions for the WHOLE of Zambia. Devote more time to it so that we’re assured that the projections you’re making are accurate. I’m just saying 🙂
Ekuba,
Hi darling!! Glad to see your post oooo!!! Long time! You are one of my favorite article writers here!!! I too, have missed you!! I’ll print the report out, read it word for word, and draw my own conclusion, then come back and report. It seems like a jooooosay read. I do hope that they had our best interests at heart. By the way, how far with the project?
@Ekuba, I also missed u loads! lol! Glad to read another post of yours now that you are an honorary guest blogger for Adventures. I think the Zambia report is an exaggeration. I am sure there is sexual abuse in Zambia and other African countries or even worldwide but the prevalence is not 90% as the report suggests. Perhaps it could be about 10%. I witnessed it myself in the early 90s when i taught in a JSS after A-Levels as part of my national service. I witnessed at least two teachers that had students as a girl friend. I wouldn’t classify it as rape as these girls consented to it but I think it is abuse as there was power imbalance in the relationship. I even heard about a case where two school girls fought over a teacher because one felt the other was snatching her teacher boyfriend from her. But it was a minority of the teachers that I saw doing it. So I am sure the percentage will be less than 10%. To get these girls I am sure the teachers would have hit on a few of them before settling on one. I don’t know about the situation now but I am sure it still exists from primary to university in Ghana. When I was at KNUST in the 90s we used to hear rumours about the students sleeping with lecturers for grades but I never witnessed one myself. Is that also abuse since uni girls are adults?
@ African Mami: thank you. and there i was thinking that VV was your only favorite writer (no offence VV) lol. i’ve missed you too but as for me, it’s not been long since i heard from you o! no way, i’ve been seeing your comments on different websites! hmmm. unless it’s someone else masquerading on different websites as ‘African Mami’. Sweetheart please read it and lemme know what you think erh? please by ‘project’ are you talking about the page for sexual abuse survivors? Nana D’s going to put that up as soon as the website’s renovated
@ Kweku: Awww, i’ve missed you and your insightful comments too! eii ‘honorary guest’ hahaha, i just thought i was some ‘guest blogger like that o’. Thank you, medaase! Of course it’s an exaggeration! maybe it’s 10% like you say or 20% and that is very bad of course and should be fixed. But there’s no need to exaggerate the situation just to bring attention to it. There’s such a thing as academic honesty. Don’t go to a country for a few weeks, evaluate 3 schools and then jump to conclusions about the state of affairs in Zambia. That is trivialising the situation! In their report, they quote a comment from a 22 year old girl who also says her teacher molests her. twenty freaking two! at that age she is equally capable of molesting the teacher herself! if we want to drive home how serious child sexual abuse is, we have to be honest about the situation, avoid exaggerations and generalizations so that people will take us and the fight to eliminate molestation seriously.
@ Ekuba
I visit only two other primary websites,…if those are the ones you talk of, yes, it is me oo. Anything else, it’s not me oo.
Yes, about the project. Great to hear. Ekuba you are the sweetest banana out of the bunch. You have my heart!! loool.
Ha! Amused at the triangle of love African Mami keeps getting herself embroiled in.
@Ekuba – Re: being sexually harassed by teachers at school. Personally I didn’t experience this although my example may counteract this statement. It was more discomfort around certain male teachers, how they would look at you, hold your hand unnecessarily and ask you to remove the blue cardigan tied around your waist so that you had to embarrass yourself and say, “Teacher I’ve soiled myself”…
Lol @ Nana Darkoa, I know what you mean by ‘discomfort’. My sister said now that she’s grown up, she’s started to realize how she felt ‘uncomfortable’ around certain men growing up and she wonders whether it was because they were child molesters?
Ugh, And why did we use to ‘soil ourselves’ so much when we were growing up? (now that i’m mature, it hardly happens to me but in secondary school, whenever it got to ‘that time of the month’ there was a huge potential for me to ‘soil myself’ and get embarrassed!)
I am a Zambian, I’m a woman and I think this report is absolute crap! I’m sure they will get a bunch of Zambians (who want money for their NGOs and visas to travel to the US for conferences) to support this study and say that the report is true. Nonsense! Child sex abuse is éxtremely high’in Zambia? Extremely high?! What the hell? Are we to assume that the numerous incidents of child sex abuse in the West are isolated incidents but in Zambia/ Africa they are the norm? Some people hold questionable views on Africa and then go to find “evidence” to support their claim. Where in Africa do boys harass girls on their way to the bathroom (as reported in this bogus research)? Where in Africa do you see teachers openly harassing girls for sex? If all these things are happening all over Zambia and Africa and are everyday occurrences, what accounts now for the high increase in young girls in colleges? What accounts for the fact that African young women are becoming more educated? According to the UN Report on the MDGs “Girls have reached parity with boys in primary school enrolment in another development milestone”. I’m fed up with all these “well-meaning experts” who invade our countries and after a week or two become experts on our traditions, culture, and way of life. The boys in Zambia harrass girls for sex in schools erh? Oprah did an expose on how ten year old girls in the US are given multiple boys oral sex in school parties. Why are these human rights experts not publishing a report about how ‘sexual activity among young children in the US is “exremely high”?
I have been reading this blog for a long time but I have never commented. I’m from Cameroon but I now live in the UK. My teacher had sex with me when i was in boarding school. I guess you could call it rape because I was 14 but I kind of agreed to it and I really used to enjoy the sex. I loved the fact that he was so in love with me and intoxicated with me. He made me feel secure because he gave me everything I needed (food, books and he explained school work to me). He wasnt married so we used to have sex at his house even though it was against school rules to go to a male teachers house. I sometimes get confused about it because I don’t know if it was rape since I enjoyed the sex and I was benefitting from what was going on. I’m married with one child but sometimes I think about him. I think I loved him? I recently read a French book called the Lover by Maguerite Dumas and I thought about him because that book is about a 15 year old girl whose true love was an older guy.
@ Landisa: I am happy to get feedback from a Zambian women. Yes, I was also thinking the same thing. If there’s an ‘extremely high’ level of sex abuse in these African countries, why are so many women going to college now in these places? I live in Ghana and the Chief Justice, Speaker of Parliament, immediate past Vice-Chancellor of one university, head of the blood bank at the biggest government hospital etc are all women. What accounts for this? And i also know that several ethnic groups in Zambia are matrilineal. Women tend to have a strong voice in matrilineal societies and are usually accorded a great deal of respect. It is interesting that the research did not even explore that angle.
@ Cherie: I am so sorry about what your teacher did to you. What he did was rape because unless you live in Spain (where the age of consent is 13), I’m sure that your country’s laws prohibit men from having sex with 14 year old girls. It doesnt matter that you enjoyed it or were in love with him. If a person has not reached the age of maturity it’s just planin wrong. It’s interesting that you mention the book ‘the Lover”. I read the English translation and felt disturbed by it because it portrayed a 15 year old girl having sex with a much older guy as normal. I don’t think such relationships are healthy because they amount to sexual abuse. And of course most of the girls fall in love with the perpetrators. Pedophiles are very manipulative and know how to ‘groom’ a girl and play psychological tricks on her so that she ‘consents’ to the abuse.
lol @ landisa about how westerners find evidence to support their ‘questionable views about Africa’. so true! it’s like, when a negative thing happens in Africa then it’s the norm but when it happens in the US or UK then it’s an isolated incident. Very few African countries have serial killings of women but in most western countries, almost every day a woman goes missing or gets kidnapped or raped by a stranger etc. Are these ‘well-meaning experts’ going to publish reports about how serial killings in the US/ rape of women by strangers is ‘extremely high’. In these countries, men sometimes kidnap little children while they sleep on their beds at home and molest them (eg. Elizabeth Smart)? And oh, this year, almost every month, there’s news of a person gunning several people down in the US (like the gunman in the cinema in Colorado). Are these people also going to come out with reports about how gun-shooting is ‘extremely high’ in the US and do studies to investigate why most white males are prone to shooting several people down? The hypocrisy! smh
Great writing, Ekuba! Eish! This woman, you just disappeared.
My problem with this is, what do you say when everyone has said what you want to say?
@ Nnenna: hi girl, of course you know that although i disappeared, i was reading you ‘succulent’ blog postings. or not so? lol
well, i guess when everyone has said what you want to say, you just go ahead and say it anyway!:)