DAVID MACFARLANE, Johannesburg | Friday
ABOUT 75% of schools expel girls who fall pregnant, but only 25% of schools also expel the father of the child.
“There’s not a school in the country that doesn’t have to face the problem of pregnancy among learners,” says Ken Alston, acting rector of the Teachers’ Centre in East London. He bases his figures on research he conducted in 1998, but sees no sign of improvement. “A genuine cross-section of schools” formed his research sample, he says.
Addressing the “Discrimination against Learners” panel of this week’s gender summit in Johannesburg, Alston said most schools practise a simple policy on pregnancy: “Throw out the girls.”
An Eastern Cape school refused recently to readmit a pupil who gave birth in May of her matric year: “To complete her matric she had to attend a school 300km from her home – and leave her baby behind,” said Alston.
Schoolgirl pregnancy received intensive attention from the panel, but girls also suffer discrimination in other areas. Some girls avoid going to school because they’re scared they’ll be sexually attacked by boys or even teachers, the panel heard, and academic gender prejudice still steers girls away from subjects such as maths, science and technology – conventionally stereotyped as masculine pursuits.
A new Statistics South Africa publication shows that girls aged 10 to 19 spend twice as much of their time on housework as boys of the same age. A Survey of Time Use suggests that girls spend slightly longer each day on learning but far less of their daily time on leisure than boys do.
At the summit gender consultant Pinkie Rajuili-Mbowane pointed to paltry government resources given to gender. “The Department of Education has massive structures and large budgets for curriculum development and early childhood development, for example, but for gender? You’ll find very few people, and they’re usually junior, handling gender. So how do we change [stereotyped gender] mindsets?”
School governing bodies came under fire from the panel for running schools contrary to the gender requirements of the Constitution, the South African Schools Act and government policy. “They show no willingness to be transforming bodies,” Rajuili-Mbowane said. “Gender priority is nowhere.”
The panel tore into teachers who enter into sexual relationships with pupils, but it also focused on parents who fail to take adequate action.
Alston said at one school parents demanded – and got – compensation of R1 500 each from teachers who’d slept with girls under 14. “The teachers should have been charged with statutory rape,” Alston said, “but the whole matter was hushed up.”
The government acknowledges that schoolgirls experience discrimination of different kinds “and we condemn it”, said William Tshabalala of the Department of Education’s gender directorate, who was also on the panel.
“Since May this year we’ve been piloting a module consisting of eight workshops and early results show it helps both school and adult learners. One workshop focuses on different cultural interpretations of sexual harassment; another on violence against lesbians and gay men; another concerns HIV/Aids and advocates sex education – to counter the social message that, for example, young women are not expected to express their sexual needs.”
Tshabalala said: “Pregnancy is still a grey area. How do we accommodate pregnant learners during their pregnancy? Should they be separately educated? Or in separate schools? The education department can’t answer these questions by itself. We will hold a national consultative workshop before taking final decisions.”