Living for Disco

We stood in front of a classroom full of 14 year olds, talking to them about rape.  We asked some questions, and received some well thought out answers; the class was a mixture of boys and girls, and they all enthusiastically joined in the debate.  One commonly held view seemed to be that if two adults have consenting sex, it is still rape if one is much older than the other.  We managed to sort out the confusion surrounding this, and move on.

“So”, asked Charmaine.  “Do you think that a husband can rape his wife?”

When the shouting subsided, various kids were allowed to speak.  I was more interested in the ones that said no, honestly, and so I pointed to a short, cocky boy in the middle.

“Why do you say no?”  I asked.

“Because they are married” he answered, predictably.

“But she still has the right to say no, doesn’t she?”

“No, because her husband is working, and paying for her food and everything, and she has to have sex with him whenever he wants because she owes him for that.”

“So, what you’re saying”, I said, when the shouting died down, “is that a wife is basically a prostitute?”

He was at pains to say that this was not what he meant, “because the wife does not sleep with many different men, only with her husband.”

“But, you’re saying that he pays her, so he has the right to force her to have sex, even when she doesn’t want to?”  I asked.

More shouting originated from a group of outraged girls at the back.

“Yes,” said my little interviewee, as if explaining some obvious fact to an imbecile.  “Because if a wife does not give her husband sex whenever he wants, that is why he turns to his children instead.”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Under African Skies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.