Perfecting their song and dance routines, virgins throughout KwaZulu-Natal are busy preparing for next month’s Reed Dance Ceremony to be held at King Zwelithini’s palace in Nongoma. This ceremony is a big event on the province’s cultural calendar, and the need to prepare young virgins to take part in the ceremony means that the services of virginity testers are in high demand at this time of year. August (aka “Woman’s Month”), is usually the time when final genital inspections are made and the required virginity certificates, that allow girls to board the bus for KwaNongoma, are issued.

While the government has sought to prohibit virginity testing through the recent Children’s Bill, the practice remains a cornerstone of traditionalist attempts to address a range of endemic sex-related social problems such as teenage pregnancy, STIs, child abuse and HIV/AIDS. From the perspective of virginity testers it’s not simply about handing out certificates and dividing what they call “the rotten potatoes from the flowers of the nation.” Ultimately it’s about reviving what many see as two important social values that are rapidly being lost with democracy and its accompanying moral degeneration; that is abstinence before marriage and pride in being a virgin.

Public interest in virginity testing as a culturally approved way to deal with contemporary social ills is growing across the continent, and its revival exposes certain contradictions that hinder the adoption of safer sex practices in many African societies. While group norms favour early sexual experimentation, at the same time the idealised behaviour for boys and girls is to delay sexual initiation. In some local studies young people report a preference for pre-marital abstinence, yet we see a progressive decline in the age of sexual debut. In a recent HSRC study on the topic, as much as 78% of young people surveyed in five South African cities said they favoured abstaining from sex before marriage. Girls especially report a desire to acquire the necessary skills and support that might assist them to remain sexually inactive. While these studies might suggest a persistent discord between indigenous cultural values and imported Christian values, they also suggest an environment that undermines young people’s sexual health decision making.

If such findings are a true reflection of how people feel towards sex before marriage, they reveal a very wide gulf between the professed ideals and the lived realities of our youth. With such wide support for abstinence, we need to ask what is it then that prevents so many from delaying sex until marriage or at least until they reach young adulthood? Apparently there are many things.

For starters there is a whole catalogue of far-fetched ideas and myths that link celibacy, most especially male celibacy, to mental and physical illness. Local studies with men representing different class and geographical backgrounds reveal that many view sex as playing a key role in the bodily regulation of a balanced supply of blood and sperm. Sex was essential for the maintenance of good health. A boy’s first nocturnal emissions are taken as a sign that henceforth sex would be required to maintain a healthy fluid balance. Among the conditions believed to be associated with lack of sex is depression, acne, obesity, violent outbursts and progressive mental deterioration. Prolonged celibacy is also said to carry the risk of sperm “going backwards” up a man’s spine to affect his brain. Should this happen, suicide is reported to be a likely result, but committing rape is also said to be a possibility as the affected man might become excessively violent and confused. The message to boys who grow up hearing such absurdities is that abstaining from sex carries a risk. A sexually inactive man is a danger to himself and society.

Beyond such myths that help to perpetuate the idea that male sexuality cannot be restrained and therefor the burden for preventing pregnancy, rape, HIV/AIDS etc, falls naturally onto the shoulders of women, there are other factors that influence the timing of sexual initiation. Studies from the southern African region have found that perceptions about the sexual behaviour of peers are a significant factor when it comes to early sex. When friends are perceived to be sexually active, the odds are that the youth will also be sexually active. For girls, the absence of a father figure in the home is linked to early sexual activity. For boys and girls urban residence is a predictor of early sexual debut, meaning that a child who lives in an urban environment is more likely to engage in sex from an earlier age than his counterparts in the rural areas. Urban residence in the violent townships of South Africa means that a girl is more likely to encounter perverse forms of stigma and victimisation for being a virgin. In some places virginity is considered to be as detestable an abnormality as lesbianism, with the treatment for both conditions being the same, a “corrective” rape. The threat of this kind of rape exists along side the threat posed by other men who think that sex with a virgin can cure them of AIDS.

Recent studies have found that most abstinence-only programmes are failing to limit the spread of HIV. This is not surprising. Such results are to be expected from any stand-alone, either-or approach to this complex disease that does not account for the particularities of peoples’ lives and the environments that sabotage HIV prevention efforts. There is a desperate need to promote a balanced response to HIV/AIDS that includes all available prevention options, with those options and messages tailored to meet the needs and circumstances of the people they seek to reach. The fact remains that the “ABCs” of HIV are still the only options we currently have to prevent infection. If some young people think that being sexually inactive in the world’s epicenter for HIV/AIDS might not be such a bad idea, then they need to be vigorously encouraged and supported in ways that will allow them to be sexually inactive and protect them from becoming HIV infected after sexual debut.

The abstinence message for young people is an important and relevant message in our current context and it needs to be taken well beyond the realm of moral authority. Neither priests nor virginity testers are best placed to challenge those things that make abstinence before marriage a near-impossibility in our country today. It’s a public health matter that requires public health authorities who are honest enough to acknowledge the ways people think and feel about HIV/AIDS, and courageous enough to speak and act on that truth.

Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala, Mike Saneka, and Sabelo Zondo

(Sunday Tribune 26 August 2007)

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Article. 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.