Latest update November 5th, 2024 1:37 AM
Moves apace to engage young men in teenage pregnancy discussions
Over the past two decades a great deal has been done by many agencies to protect the young female, a notion that was recently amplified by Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, Dr Frank Anthony.
But although there has been nothing to minimise or render such programmes complacent, Dr Anthony, who was at the time speaking at a press conference at the Guyana International Conference Centre, disclosed that a great deal is not done to protect the young male.
At the time he was speaking in direct reference to the situation of teenage pregnancy, which, according to him, has implications for both genders.
Health Minister Dr Bheri Ramsaran (left) and Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, Dr Frank Anthony.
“Men are part of this, and too often the discussions about teenage pregnancy centre around young women, but we do not involve the young male as a participant, but only as a bystander.”
Moreover, he insisted that one of the concrete measures to remedy this situation is to involve the young male who, he noted, is marginalised even at the academic level. He pointed to the fact that more women are entering university, and are better qualified, thereby allowing them to claim most of the professional careers.
Adding his bit to the state of affairs, Minister of Health Dr Bheri Ramsaran noted that previously the Caribbean had indications from various studies that the young male was in trouble. However, he speculated that “probably because that phenomenon had not exploded globally it was not getting traction”.
As such, he noted that although the Ministry of Health has been collaborating with the Ministries of Education and Culture to raise awareness about male friendly programmes, “we will continue to support and try to expand our girl-friendly programmes— programmes aimed at promoting the health and wellness of the girl child and young women— but we now have to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ because our young men are part of the problem too.”
Alluding to moves by Barbados to address the same situation, Minister Ramsaran said that “they have an approach with the boys who have gotten young girls pregnant and are trying to engage them when the baby would have been born to be part of the process…”
The Barbados programme is designed in such a way that it caters to incorporating the young women back into the school system after giving birth.
Barbados, the Minister said, has a very robust programme in this regard, which is in fact a best practice that Guyana has plans to adopt in the very near future.
“These are some of the important things that Guyana needs to look at, and myself and Dr Anthony have committed to look at them,” Dr Ramsaran stated.
He however noted that while moves are being made to prevail on the young male to desist from their engagements with the young female, “We are saying why speak to him after that engagement? Why not speak to him before he gets the young lady into this tight spot?”
According to the Health Minister, the debutant age of many youths in the Caribbean has been found to be as low as nine, a situation he opined is often fuelled by the lyrics of some songs made popular by the media. Moreover, he noted that the media must take responsibility for helping to create the existing problem “where the young female is pressed to go into certain activities to prove herself and where the young male is given a certain connotation of what or how the young female should be treated.”
The problem, according to Dr Ramsaran, is linked to the fact that the young people are not given access to needful knowledge, and by extension, the consciousness that adults have before engaging in adult behaviour.
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