(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
Financial insecurity, high unemployment and emotional neglect are driving “blesser” relationships in South Africa, causing long-term health and psychological damage to adolescent girls and young women involved with older men.
Nearly 83% of African women in the country are involved in intergenerational sexual relationships, University of Pretoria clinical psychologist Sibongile Sibanyoni said, citing a 2022 study.
“Many young women from impoverished backgrounds engage in blesser/blessee relationships with older men for financial security and luxuries — financial deprivation mainly,” Sibanyoni told a recent webinar.
“With financial dependence that blessees tend to have on the blessers, you find that their ability to be autonomous, or their ability to leave the relationship when they want to, become really restricted.”
South Africa’s unemployment rate increased to 32.9% in the first quarter of 2025, according to Statistics South Africa, with young people bearing the brunt.
Of the 10.3 million South Africans aged 15 to 24, 37.1% were not in employment, education, or training (NEET). Compared with the first quarter of 2024, the NEET rate rose by 1.0 percentage point for females and 2.3 points for males in the first three months of this year, with female rates remaining higher overall, according to Stats SA.
Adolescent girls and young women in transactional relationships are exposed to HIV/Aids, unintended pregnancies and may drop out of school, which then severely harms their future, Sibanyoni said.
A 2024 study published in the National Library of Medicine showed that in sub-Saharan Africa transactional sex relationships are known drivers of new HIV infections among adolescent girls and young women. The prevalence of HIV among adolescent girls in South Africa has reached “crisis proportions”.
“These relationships are characterised by an imbalance of power occasioned by age and gender inequalities, economic disparities, and violence or threats. AGYW [adolescent girls and young women] are often not able to negotiate safer sex practices with their older male partners and are vulnerable to multiple forms of sexual exploitation and violence,” it said.
Other drivers include emotional dependence on older men, especially for girls whose needs were neglected in this regard.
“Blessers present themselves as very loving and caring. They buy lunch for these young women, they buy clothes for them or take them to restaurants and all of those things,” said Sibanyoni.
“There is also that caring aspect that the young women sometimes appreciate so much because they are not getting it from their homes. But then here it comes at a cost because they have to be intimate with this older person and usually it’s according to the older person’s terms — how the intimacy needs to take place and when and so forth.”
The power-imbalance between the provider and the beneficiary makes the relationship a risk
“There’s this inadvertent power imbalance and reinforcement that is so clear in blesser/blessee relationships — older men control access to resources making it difficult for young women to leave — even sometimes when they were experiencing acts of gender-based violence especially in terms of how the blesses want intimacy to take place — if it was in their own terms,” Sibanyoni said.
“Some women said that it was very dehumanising and degrading … So for young women not to have access to resources really, really puts them at a disadvantage.”
The financial pressure, combined with family and societal pressure, are also driving young women into getting involved with older men for material benefits, Anisa Moosa, the national coordinator at the National Shelter Movement of South Africa told the Mail & Guardian.
She spoke of cases where relatives encouraged their daughters to get into relationships with older men to support the family.
“Young girls are probably looking to survive. Families are okay with that, sometimes even encouraging such relationships, because they will also then benefit from those relationships,” she said.
Images of the “good life” shown on social media also encourage young women to pursue blessers, Moosa said, and Sibanyoni concurred that peer pressure normalises these relationships without acknowledging the pitfalls and dangers of it.
“If there are friends or peers in these kinds of relationships spreading the gospel of the benefits and the gains and how good it is, more young people also would obviously like to experience that for themselves and to experience the benefits of being in such a relationship,” said Sibanyoni.
A multi-pronged approach is needed to tackle transactional relationships in South Africa, she said, including self-esteem and resilience workshops, trauma-informed counselling, and comprehensive sexual health education for girls and young women.
At the community level, legal advocacy and awareness campaigns should encourage stronger protections and change harmful norms.
Sibanyoni said girls and young women also need to be economically empowered through, for example, vocational training, job placement, and financial literacy to reduce their dependence on men and entering into harmful transactional relationships.