Fight sexual abuse against children
With the extension of the virus-induced lockdown, health and education experts have warned of an increasing number of teenage pregnancies, stigma and mental health problems among school-going children.
Health experts argue that due to lack of or inadequate sexual reproductive services and information coupled with some students being confined with their potential abusers during lockdown, numerous unintended pregnancies could be one of the negative effects.
Prior, police expressed concern over the high reported cases of sex related offences against children.
While releasing the Annual Crime Report for 2019 recently, the Inspector General of Police, Mr Martin Okoth Ochola, revealed that defilement still poses a big problem to the police.
According to police, in 2019, whereas there was decrease in defilement cases by 11.4 per cent from 2018, a total of 13,682 children were defiled.
Therefore, in its relief interventions to ease the effects of the lockdown, government ought to take child abuse, especially sexual offences, into consideration.
In addition to availing learners with study materials about the traditional subjects, the Education ministry should also include sexual reproductive health information materials. This is crucial in helping learners deal with the already enormous Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights challenges.
Offenders are more likely to take advantage of the situation against the girl child who’s currently more vulnerable than ever before.
During this period, local authorities; village chairpersons, child protection agencies and probation officers should be more vigilant and ready to intervene where necessary.
Without addressing this issue, the lockdown might have several unintended repercussions on the sexuality of learners.
In the long run, however, government should accelerate the finalisation of the National School Health Policy which has been on the shelves for the last 19 years.
Worth noting is that such a policy could have come in handy since it, among other things, provides guidelines on how to manage cases of pregnant school girls, address issues of menstrual health, mental health and obesity in schools.
