Our teenagers gone wild need love, protection not judgement

As far as parenting dreams go, the past few weeks have been a nightmare. The Sodom and Gomorrah where teenagers engaged in sex orgies, drug and alcohol binges were houses owned by adults. Two such cases were reported in Nairobi, and another in Siaya County.

One can’t help but wonder if parents had used cautionary tales about alcohol, drugs and sex so much that they had lost their power.

In Tana River County, it was a different horror story for a single mother of five whose three 16-year-old daughters brought home three sets of twins, the results of defilement by a farm worker.

Such cases are what prompted a reader to send a letter to the editor published in the Daily Nation on November 25 headlined The rod has been spared for far too long. It represented a reaction that has recently dominated social media conversations over the Teens Gone Wild topic.

Yet experience has taught us — painfully — that no amount of flogging can suppress teenage hormones; they will always come bubbling back up.

Urban teenagers

That’s why a teenager in Nairobi is as vulnerable as one in Tana River, even if the latter might be less exposed to information on sex that could potentially guide their choices. That some of the urban teenagers were caught with condoms is testament to some level of knowledge and exposure.

The news reports about the teenagers who were caught in wild parties were rife with information on how skimpily dressed some of them were. Beneath the shield of journalism was an unasked question about the morality of the teenagers.

Questions were also raised about the inadequacy of their parents’ skills in parenting. The National Parents Association got busy apportioning blame: to the Ministry of Education for not keeping the teenagers busy enough, and to parents who “exposed their children to child labour”. The latter was not elaborated. Maybe the parents they claim to represent need to pay them a visit and get the details of the allegation.

The teenagers may have set themselves up for moral judgement but the discussion about moral decay should be amputated from this situation. Instead, it should be redirected to the unscrupulous, faceless (you can’t tell who they are behind the hoodies and Covid-19 masks they don during court sessions) and sometimes nameless adults involved.

And the troubling “willing buyer, willing seller” theory fronted by some Kenyans in relation to the orgies reeks of victim-shaming and has no place in situations like these. This would be a fantastic time to resuscitate the idea of comprehensive sex education in schools.