The Sunday Mail
Murder is common in Zimbabwe. So are prostitution and adultery. So is rape.
These are vices found in most human societies. But what separates human beings from dogs and other beasts is that these vices are frowned upon in civilised societies.
They might be tolerated in certain Western countries just as they tolerate homosexuality and same sex marriage, but they are hardly a norm.
This cuts across all customs, religions and cultures regardless of however developed or backward a country might be.
In most African countries all these vices are illegal. They offend against the moral sensibilities of most people. Some of them, like prostitution and adultery, are seen as undermining the marriage institution, the basic unit of every society.
Their prevalence in any society is a great cause for concern, whatever the reasons and attempts at self-justification or rationalisation.
Outside a war situation, no society or country, religion or culture can justify murder because of its prevalence. That reasoning is fatally flawed.
A vice cannot be legalised or become socially acceptable merely because it is wrong. Instead functional human societies try to curb the vices by devising and imposing what are taken to be deterrent sentences. There will always be deviants in every society, but the purpose of sanctioning certain behaviour is moderate human conduct, to get everybody to be as close as possible to an acceptable median.
To give in and allow any of the above vices to flourish without sanction merely because they are seen as prevalent, without any attempt to address the root causes is, in my view, to renounce the whole concept of society, our ability as humans to regulate ourselves, to accept that we are less than human and thus driven more by our passions than reasoning capacity.
It is to descend into an amoral world in which every bad behaviour or act can be justified and accepted as normal.
Zimbabwe is classified by the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child as among countries with the highest prevalence of child marriages on the continent.
Child rights advocates are lobbying governments and other regional agencies to raise awareness on this social scourge.
They are also appealing to parliaments for stiffer penalties against offenders.
The prevalence rates are higher in rural settings, at times due to cultural beliefs but also because of poverty, the latter of which might be an existential factor after all means of survival have been exhausted.
The girl child is the final sacrifice. Thus child rights lobbyists are seeking the cooperation of traditional leaders to ensure that as far as possible the girl child is allowed to get a reasonable standard of education to improve her marketability and bargaining power in society.
But in other departments we are appear to be succumbing too fast to moral relativism. It is possibly the first time that it has been publicly mentioned that sex and marriage for children as young as 12 years can be a socially acceptable coping mechanism once they drop out of school and “they have nothing to do”.
These views were attributed to the prosecutor general in response to complaints that magistrates were handing down too lenient sentences for people who have sex with children as young as 12 years.
Some “offenders” have been sentenced to a few hours of community service, causing a lot of outrage, including anxiety of trivialising child rape.
Mr Johannes Tomana reportedly said girls mature faster than boys and by the time they reach the age of 12 they are mature enough to consent to sex and marriage.
He hinted that it might be necessary to carry out a national survey to solicit the views of the young children instead of purporting to speak for them.
The Prosecutor-General’s views have dire implications for the girl child in our society if they become the dominant thinking.
The first is obviously that the girl child is left exposed to predators who know that the worst penalty they can expect for sleeping with a little girl “with her consent” is a public “humiliation” by being made to cut grass, possibly at her school.
The second is the view that having sex with a young might soon cease to be an offence if it turns out that the practice is very prevalent if a survey were to be carried out. It is a peculiar case of a vice seeking to rationalise itself into acceptable behaviour purely by its prevalence. In which case we might have accept murder, theft, prostitution, homosexuality and rape.
This particular case has the effect of undermining the efforts of those campaigning for an end to child marriages.
The girls might be the problem, not the victims of social maladies!
The third point might turn out to be a constitutional matter. If a girl of 12 is presumed to have reasoning capacity to consent to sex and the desire to found a family of her own, why can’t the same girl make the simpler decision on which political party or leader to vote for in an election, a decision which can be informed by her family, as children often do with soccer teams?
Why do we insist that the legal age of majority is 21 and that adolescents are only able to vote in national elections when they reach the age of 18, implying that before then they are unable to make informed choices?
When did our society reduce sex to cheap sport for children?
Joram Nyathi is the Zimpapers Group Political Editor
