Young city women normalised sex for 'sponsorship’ during Covid crisis
Covid-19 restrictions limited access to job opportunities, leading to transaction sex-based relationships.
What you need to know:
- Transactional sex benefits consisted of money (19.4 per cent), necessities such as food, safety, shelter and transport (21.5pc), gifts (7.2pc) and all combined (27.5pc).
- Study calls on providers of sexual and reproductive health services to 'address and respond to these relationships in a nonjudgmental way to ensure access to necessary health support'.
Just how did the coronavirus restrictions affect adolescent and young women in Nairobi? This is the gist of a 2021 study, Gendered Health, Economic, Social and Safety Impact of Covid-19 on Adolescents and Young Adults in Nairobi, Kenya, by Decker and others.
The study was conducted by Performance Monitoring and Action, a partnership bringing together the International Centre for Reproductive Health-Kenya, Kenyatta University and Johns Hopkins University under the sponsorship of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It reveals two major things.
First, transactional sex is normative among young women in Nairobi. Two, it became a “way for women and girls to obtain resources they may not otherwise be able to afford” during Covid restrictions, which limited access to informal labour opportunities.
But what is transactional sex? This is a situation in which “sex is implicitly exchanged for material support or other benefits” in an ongoing relationship. It is distinct from commercial sex work, which manifests in Kenya mainly as prostitution. In normal parlance, transactional sex is what Kenyans call sponsorship.
As explained by the study, such relationships are embedded in “underlying gendered economic disparities that disadvantage women, together with gendered social norms that emphasise men’s provider roles”.
A related policy brief, Gender and Covid-19: Transactional partnerships and sex trade (2020), shows that 35.6 per cent of young women interviewed started or continued a transactional sexual relationship during the Covid restrictions.
A whopping 57.2 per cent of those in such partnerships were involved before and during Covid, with 49.1 per cent becoming increasingly dependent on the same since the restrictions.
Benefits accrued consisted of money (19.4 per cent), necessities such as food, safety, shelter and transport (21.5 per cent), gifts (7.2 per cent) and all combined (27.5 per cent). That gifts feature as the least benefit clearly shows that these relationships were denominated by economic needs more than genuine romance.
How young women juggle partners to satisfy multiple needs was explained by a 19-year-old female participant who stated that “we girls look at the needs…this one (partner) will be for the hair, this one (partner) for rent”. This certainly means that no one partner satisfies all the needs.
The normalisation of transactional sex is illustrated in the statement by an 18-year-old male respondent that relationships among young people are conditioned on money to “nourish” them.
This can only mean that young women even expect financial support from their peers, underlining that there is no romance without finance, and suggesting that sex is increasingly commercialised in what passes for genuine intimacies.
That young women regarded transactional sex as inevitable and pragmatic is illustrated in the following remarks of a 17-year-old girl: “Most girls will have sponsors and the main person whom they are dating. Being in a relationship …if you don’t use your brain and your mind…for sure your body parts will suffer the most."
This could mean that naivety will only result in suffering for those who do not seek sponsors, but also that girls pay a heavy physical price from the sexual demands of sponsors.
It also confirms that although the girls had what they regard as regular partners, the same could not meet their financial and material needs, colloquially referred to in relationship circles as being “good for nothing”.
It is worrying that the sponsors could themselves be having multiple partners and blackmailing the young women into risky intercourse using the carrot (money) and stick (unprotected sex) paradigm.
As the study points out, multiple partnerships in “transactional sex can introduce risks for compromised sexual and reproductive autonomy, unintended pregnancy, and STI/HIV”.
The finding that “increased financial pressure on young women …may further shape transactional sex dynamics” points to the likelihood that such behaviour can become lifelong. This is given credence to by the cohort studied, namely 664 adolescent and young women aged 15-24.
That this group has already mastered transactional sex as a norm may imply that they carry it into marriage and develop an attitude that there is always a man ready to provide finance and meet daily needs as long as sex is made available. The trend also justifies transactional sex as the default escape route during times of economic stress.
The study calls on providers of sexual and reproductive health services to “address and respond to these relationships in a nonjudgmental way to ensure access to necessary health support for young women involved”.
It also recommends economic support to enable the young women adversely affected to regain “economic autonomy, and relieve their economic dependence on transactional partners”.
But one question lingers. If young women have internalised transactional sex as a way of life, would external economic support wean them from it? And is there any more room for unconditional romance?
The writer is an international gender and development consultant and scholar ([email protected]).
