MOZAMBIQUE – SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF SCHOOLGIRLS

By Johanna Higgs, Anthropologist

Director of Australia Women’s NGO: Project MONMA

‘The teachers ask the children for sex,’ says Emilia Dausse, a 19-year-old student secondary school at Caterina Anmando in Mozambique. We’re sitting in a small café on the beautiful Barra beach discussing male teachers who exchange grade in return for sexual favors from their underage female students. ‘The teachers say that they will give them better marks which will help them go further with university. They’ll ask 14 or 15 year old girls. The students think that there is no option, they can get some money or food and pass the grade, things can be a little bit better so they do it.’ I ask her if there is anywhere that she can go for help, she shakes her head. ‘The headmaster is doing it as well,’ she says.

In a country steeped with poverty, young girls in Mozambique are facing enormous barriers to their education. Beyond the financial struggles many schoolgirls must deal with a series of socio cultural barriers of discrimination and a culture of corruption that runs rife through the country. According to Transparency International corruption affects the police, public judiciary and public financial management in Mozambique. However, the entrance of corruption into schoolyards with teachers exchanging grades for sexual relations is particularly outrageous.

An American teacher who prefers not to be named worked for two years in a Secondary School in rural Mozambique. She first became aware of sexual harassment in her school after a teacher came to her house to harass a student she was living with.

She reported in an interview that many male teachers were changing the student’s grades. She began to learn that student’s grades had nothing to do with merit, but was instead about who their family members were, if the child’s family had paid the teachers or if the girls were girlfriends of the teachers. Intelligent students were failing and children who were not good students and were passing with flying colors.

‘The teachers became angry with me because I wasn’t letting them change students grades and dismantle their sex system,’ she said.

‘One day I walked into a classroom of a teacher and he had written how much it would cost to pass the grade on the board,’ she says. ‘They don’t even try to hide it.’

She saw students as young as 13 being harassed by teachers. The teachers were around 30 or 40 years old.

The teachers would blame the students were provoking them for their clothes and would directly call girls sluts, she told me. ‘The male teachers would work together and if one female student wouldn’t sleep with a teacher the other male teachers would gang up on her and all give her bad grades.’

Rita a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Barra beach who was attending Escola Secondaria Conguiana confirms teachers are asking children for sex.

‘They give the girls their phone number and ask them to call them. They don’t want to get married, they just want to have sex with the girls and leave them,’ she says.

If students say no they’ll be in trouble with their marks; if they accept then they’ll get better marks. She reports that it happens a lot.

‘The teachers are taking advantage of the children’s poverty,’ say Emilia. ‘Sex is a business,’ she says. ‘I don’t think it’s right.’

UNICEF has reported that the prevalence of violence, sexual abuse and harassment in schools has been identified by parents as a factor influencing their decision not to send their girls to school.

In a meeting with Shaista de Araujo, a women’s rights activist based in Maputo she tells me that the biggest problem is that Mozambique is a patriarchal society and girls are expected to be submissive. They are less valued which inevitably leads to abuse.

Girls in Mozambique face entrenched gender discrimination, harmful practices such as child marriage and widespread gender based violence. According to a 2015 survey by the health ministry 46% of girls aged 15 – 19 have been pregnant at least once.

According to the UN about fifty percent of women in Mozambique experience some form of violence at some point in their lives. UNICEF found that 34% of women had been beaten most often by a husband or someone they knew. Women in rural areas were reporting more violence than women in urban areas.

The problem is the girls don’t know their rights,’ says Araujo.

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The problem of sexual abuse in schools is further exacerbated by teachers refusing to take responsibility for their own actions and are instead blaming the students. Their excuse for their inappropriate behavior is the way the students are dressed. Araujo reported that recently the Ministry of Education changed the uniform so that girls had to wear long skirts. The Mozambican Young Feminist Movement, Movfemmme and others responded with protests in response to the new rule which resulted in some of her colleagues being put in jail. ‘We said that they should be focusing on the real problem which is the teachers who are not protecting the girls rights, not what the girls are wearing,’ she said.

‘I have to believe that things can get better,’ says Araujo. ‘We need to find ways to get women to wake up and realize their rights.’

There is indeed a desperate need for women in Mozambique to realize their rights. As sexual abuse amongst girls in schools appears to be the norm throughout Mozambique there is much work to be done. It would seem that in order to decrease girl’s vulnerability to abusive teachers, it is necessary to reduce poverty. However as long as corruption and inefficiency runs rampant through the country, poverty will thrive as will the cycles of violence. What will this mean for schoolgirls who attend schools where teachers use incentives to trade sex for grades? What will this mean for a schoolgirl with dreams of being a doctor? Must she be forced to compromise between prostituting herself or just simply missing out on an education? Just because some male teacher chooses not to control himself. No young girl ever deserves to be placed in such a situation and it is up to all of us in our own communities to ensure that no girl ever is. It is up to all of us to speak up when we see and hear of such cases of sexual harassment.

We must condemn it, we must report it to local authorities and we must insist, that such behavior is always inappropriate and that we will not let school teachers abuse girls because they are poor. While women and girls fear attending school, going to work or walking in the street due to sexual innuendos, inappropriate staring and touching no woman and girl will be able to live her life freely and fairly. Every woman and girl deserves to live her life in the way that she chooses and she deserves to do that free from violence and harassment. Let’s make that happen.