Sex for jobs

How bad do things have to get in society before sexual predators are beaten up in broad daylight on the street? The answer is very, very bad.

What we saw on yesterday’s front page – a woman’s family taking on her boss after he admitted to forcing her to have sex with him – is only the tip of the ice-berg. Sexual harassment and forced sex is a regular part of job-seeking for women in this country.
Unfortunately, women themselves are all too vulnerable to falling into this trap because of the desperation for jobs; yet no job is worth the humiliation of being subjected to sex one doesn’t want to have.

Any woman who finds herself in a similar position to this unnamed young university graduate - being driven to a strange homestead in the middle of the night by her employer and held against her will – needs to immediately call the police.
That is what cellphones are for.  It is terribly important that they reject any advances from the start in order to avoid the unfair accusation of being willing to use their bodies to get employment. In the overwhelming majority of cases this is not the case, as this young woman showed; after all she had a boyfriend who had fathered her children waiting for her at home.

 We also have a cultural problem where women who are forced into sex are accused of adultery and chased away from the homes they share with their husbands (although technically, as she wasn’t married, this would not have been adultery).  But not wanting to be chased away by the father of her children was one reason this young woman gave for keeping silent so long.

The man, we use the term loosely here, in question; a programme manager of an association in Manzini, played the victim himself, saying that ‘what befell him could happen to any man’. No, it couldn’t and in fact it doesn’t.
In Swazi culture, the definition of a man is a person who looks after his wife, or wives, and children and remains faithful to her or them – that is one reason why we have the institution of polygamy; for those for whom one woman is not enough, so that relationships can be made proper in the eyes of all.

There are many men who subscribe to this code of conduct, although perhaps not as many as there used to be. But to explain away a criminal act as an unavoidable event is the worst kind of cowardice and demonstrates a lack of personal responsibility below that of a toddler herding cattle. 
 We need to put a stop to sexual exploitation because, as a society, if we allow this to continue we are raping our own future and destroying the self-respect of our citizens. So-called men who behave like this should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Diminishing returns

SNAT is right to be concerned about the drafting of as many as 2 000 teachers as election observers, as it will mean a drop in the level of education service provided to our children.

The dilemma the EBC has is that people have to have reached a certain level of education to appreciate what an election is and how it should be conducted – but these are generally the people who are already employed in responsible positions.

Yet it’s a vicious cycle – as pupils miss more and more school, we have less and less people to rely on. What to do?

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