{"id":9992,"date":"2018-10-23T12:23:55","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T10:23:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=9992"},"modified":"2018-10-23T12:23:55","modified_gmt":"2018-10-23T10:23:55","slug":"witness-girls-in-senegal-risk-losing-their-futures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2018\/10\/witness-girls-in-senegal-risk-losing-their-futures\/","title":{"rendered":"Witness: Girls in Senegal Risk Losing Their Futures"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Human Rights Watch<\/a>\u00a0– \u201cFanta\u201d lost her future, her friends, and, for a while, her family, when she got pregnant at 17. The man who got her pregnant, and whom she had been seeing for nearly two years, rejected her and acknowledged nothing.<\/p>\n

He was Fanta\u2019s teacher and he still teaches in the same school and lives in the same village. Fanta, who had to abandon her dream of being a midwife, has to see him in the community as she walks through the village with the son he rejected.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIn some communities in Senegal, this kind of \u201crelationship\u201d between a teacher and a female student is normalized, it\u2019s seen as something that is inevitable when male teachers are around adolescent girls,\u201d said Human Rights Watch researcher Elin Martinez.<\/p>\n

A new report, \u201cIt\u2019s Not Normal<\/a>,\u201d looks at sexual exploitation, harassment, and abuse of girls in secondary schools in Senegal, and how girls\u2019 complaints about teachers trying to coerce them into sex sometimes fall on deaf ears.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Download It’s Not Normal Report<\/a><\/p>\n

Download the annex of the report<\/a><\/p>\n

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In many of these cases, what the teacher does amounts to a sexual offense under Senegalese Law because a child is involved. It\u2019s also completely unethical. But the abusers rarely face consequences.<\/p>\n

When he learned she was pregnant, her father kicked her out of the house.<\/p>\n

Fanta really thought she was in a relationship with the teacher who then abandoned her after she became pregnant.<\/p>\n

Teachers having \u201crelationships\u201d with their child students \u201cisn\u2019t often seen as abuse, but that is absolutely what it is,\u2019\u201d said Elin.<\/p>\n

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Elin learned of Fanta\u2019s story from a volunteer health worker and decided to speak to her. The health worker helps adolescent girls and boys get health services they need, including HIV tests and advice about sexually transmitted infections. He had followed Fanta\u2019s case closely, but he lost touch with her when she became pregnant. Fanta moved to Ziguinchor, a large city in southern Senegal, in an attempt to escape her village for a big town where no one would know her.<\/p>\n

Eventually, the health worker tracked down Fanta, and encouraged her to return home. Fanta\u2019s family accepted her back and tried once again to get the teacher to admit that he had made Fanta pregnant, but he still refused. The school principal would not even talk to Fanta once he heard she was pregnant.<\/p>\n

In Senegal, cases such as Fanta\u2019s are sometimes settled privately, in what is commonly known as \u201cmaslaha,\u201d with the men at least agreeing to pay a stipend, give the child their surname, and in some cases agreeing to marry the girl. That is a problem in itself in a country with persistently high rates of child marriage and violence against women and girls. In Fanta\u2019s case, the man refused to accept any responsibility at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn many communities, it\u2019s more about not bringing shame on the family than protecting the girls,\u201d Elin said.<\/p>\n

To meet Fanta, Elin traveled the long, bumpy and dusty road to the village, over an hour away from the town of S\u00e9dhiou, in southern Senegal. When they came to her family\u2019s compound, Fanta\u2019s now 6-year-old son ran around playing while Fanta told her story.<\/p>\n

Sitting in the shadows cast by the sprawling branches of a large tree in her family\u2019s front yard, she told Elin about the \u201crelationship,\u2019 and the shame and humiliation she felt when she realized she was pregnant.<\/p>\n

Even though other teachers and her friends knew about it, no one said anything or supported her. In many places, teenagers\u2019 sexuality is still a taboo topic, so the girls who are the victims of the abuse also bear the brunt of social stigma.<\/p>\n

\u201cTaboos and stigma really affect the conversation and bring silence,\u201d Elin said. \u201cOther girls speak very negatively about the girls who enter these \u2018relationships\u2019 with teachers, or those who are sexually exploited or harassed \u2013 they think girls do this to get good grades and to be the best in class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some school principals don\u2019t take girls\u2019 sexual harassment claims seriously, or punish the teachers. Some teachers try to manipulate the situation, sometimes even threatening to give girls bad grades if they don\u2019t have sex with them. Other times, they offer to pay a girl\u2019s school fees or give them money for food.<\/p>\n

In another case, Elin met A\u00efssato, a secondary school student, who complained to her principal that a teacher was marking her grades down because she refused to have sex with him. The teacher eventually admitted this and stopped harassing her, but beyond reprimanding him for his behavior, the principal did nothing to address the teacher\u2019s abuse of his position of authority over the girls. He carried on teaching at the school.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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A\u00efssato said that later, he got a different child pregnant. And he was certainly not the only teacher who had sexual relations with a student at the school.<\/p>\n

Fanta married a man from another village a few years after she had her son, and Fanta\u2019s husband agreed to give the boy his name, meaning that the child is more accepted socially. But, she told Elin, every time she saw her former teacher walking through the village she relived her pain. While he hasn\u2019t had to stop teaching in the school, Fanta had to drop out to look after her baby. Her family tried to support her to go back, but Fanta was discouraged after spending a long time away.<\/p>\n

While she was pregnant, Fanta got confidential advice from the health worker, who works at the Adolescent Health Center in S\u00e9dhiou, but regularly travels to villages in the region to do important outreach work with teenagers. The center itself receives very little funding to provide basics services, and most workers are entirely voluntary.<\/p>\n

He helped Fanta as far as he could, especially listening to her and accompanying her during her pregnancy, and when she had to deal with the social isolation she endured afterward. Limited funding from the government, however, means that many of the adolescent health service centers in this part of Senegal have very limited resources. They lack the qualified personnel to provide direct services, and instead focus on offering referrals.<\/p>\n

Within their limitations, they focus on providing vital information for adolescents, and filling in the enormous information gap. Abortion is illegal in Senegal, so the centers try to provide information about contraception, and protection from HIV and pregnancy, but girls are often told in school that if they use contraception now, they will fail to get pregnant once they are married.<\/p>\n

Local health centers might be closer to the girls, but staff there can refuse to provide information about birth control or sexual health to teenagers they don\u2019t think should be sexually active.<\/p>\n

\u201cChildren don\u2019t know if what they are saying is private, or who will judge them, so they\u2019d rather just not ask for help,\u201d Elin said. \u201cAs a teenager, it is difficult to suffer sexual exploitation, and then be constantly told that you are to blame, and that everything you\u2019ve done is wrong and shameful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Girls like Fanta are in an impossible situation. If they try to get contraception, they are judged by their community. If they get pregnant, they can be shunned and forced to drop out of school.<\/p>\n

\u201c[People] knew about it, but they said nothing,\u201d Fanta told Elin. \u201cI felt ashamed in class.\u201d<\/p>\n

No girl should have to feel ashamed for being a victim of sexual abuse. And every girl, in Senegal and other countries, should be able to go to school and learn and grow in an atmosphere free of sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cFanta\u201d lost her future, her friends, and, for a while, her family, when she got pregnant at 17. The man who got her pregnant, and whom she had been seeing for nearly two years, rejected her and acknowledged nothing.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":9994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,85,43,11,88,17,49,10],"tags":[688,531,729,146],"class_list":["post-9992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editor-selection","category-human-rights","category-human-rights-online-library","category-issues","category-slider","category-women","category-womens-rights","category-world","tag-africa","tag-child-abuse","tag-child-marriage","tag-violence-against-women","country-world","Documents-statements-multimedia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9992"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9996,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9992\/revisions\/9996"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}