Assertiveness for girls

A recent case where a 16 year-old girl has been jailed for 25 years for killing her father who tried to rape her, only underlines the need for awareness training of the problem at all levels of society. There are many protests at the harshness and injustice of this sentence and hopefully something will change.

I spent the morning talking to 130 secondary girls. First on the agenda was the re-usable sanitary pad project. These girls know me after the eco-san toilet training and the Read for the Top, but they were still embarrassed by the topic for the first while. Only three of the girls said they had parents who would buy them pads each month. We calculated easily that each of them misses at least one month of school every year. 95% indicated they could bring the 40 shillings (50c) needed for a small pouch of four re-usable pads. Canadian benefactors will subsidize about $1 per pouch. The girls spent some time practicing how to attach them to underwear with much giggling.

Then we progressed to Assertiveness training. We used some materials from the old BC personal development program and some Virtues cards. We did role plays on simple situations and shared with partners situations where the new skills could be used.

Then came the big topic: saying NO to pressure for sexual relations. We used a recent article from the Daily Nation about teenage pregnancy and discussed how our new assertiveness skills could help these young women from cutting short their education. We cannot do anything about early marriage and rape, but hopefully will reduce the number of school-girl pregnancies in this area.

On Friday I'll show some African videos on the problem of sexual predators and incest and then we'll do the same training with boys with the emphasis on respect and responsibility..