11 year old child mothers

Monitor Editor | Monday June 9, 2014 17:49

It is not only the phenomenon of an 11- year-old girl giving birth that is a moral shocker. The number of child mothers is also a cause for concern. The child mothers have been denied the chance to experience and

enjoy childhood, as they have become parents overnight. It spells doom for their personal development, for how would the newmothers be able to continue their education in preparation for better paying careers. They

have been condemned to early poverty that would be difficult to get out of.

What is also worrying is the realisation that the new child-mothers are being forced into child sex by adults who take advantage of their social problems in a district that is home to thousands of orphan girls.

We should be taking care of orphans and not taking advantage of them like the evidence from Maun shows. In fact this story does not augur well for Maun the tourism hub, which may be perceived as a town where visitors turn to vulnerable 11 year olds for entertainment. It could also be the tip of an iceberg. This statistics has only been

made available by an NGO fighting for the welfare of vulnerable children in that part of the country. It makes one wonder how many more of these cases we have in the various towns and districts of this country.

It should not be the responsibilities of a particular NGO to investigate the problem, let this be an eye opener for even responsible government departments, district commissioners all over the country to wake up and investigate the extent of child sex in Botswana, for the stats could even be more alarming than what The Monitor is breaking this week.

An upper middle income government should be able to easily investigate the extent of this problem and come up with interventions that would enable the victims to once again live normal child lives, go to school, prepare for future careers and move out of the circle of poverty. Living these responsibility on the shoulders of NGO’s would

not be sufficient, we need national programs that would give our children dignity as they årestructure their tartared lives.