By GRACE NAKATO
Did you know that indecent dressing is ‘an open invite to rapists’, at least according to Ugandan Youth Affairs Minister Ronald Kibule, who is also Mukono North MP?
He was addressing youth in Ntungamo District and perhaps did not appreciate the dress code of the females in the crowd.
During his speech, he said; “I have talked to the Inspector General of Police and the police in Kampala to see that if a woman is raped, they first look at how she was dressed! Most women currently dress poorly, especially the youth. If she is dressed scantily and got raped, no one should be arrested!”
I just wondered whether he knows that rape is against the law? This is not the Idi Amin era where government has prescribed a specific skirt length.
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Defilement
The State Minister for Primary Health Care Sarah Opendi, has also been smoking from the same pipe as Kibule. During a breakfast meeting organised by the Ministry of Health to address maternal mortality, she said government is in preparations to avail contraception to girls aged between 14–18 years at convenient places within their schools, hospitals, where they will get condoms, pills and counseling.
She says girls in this age bracket get pregnant and try to procure backstreet abortions, and this measure will ensure their education is not curtailed. Is she aware that the Child Protection Act states that anyone who engages in sex with a minor shall be guilty of defilement and is liable to get a death sentence?
Wayward
Our leadership appears to be more concerned with personal accumulation of wealth as the leaders of tomorrow go to the dogs!
First they did away with caning in schools, now they want to give our children pills and condoms. I believe if government prosecuted all defilers — male and female —it would reduce the teenage pregnancy rates by at least 50 per cent. Government should go a step further and arrest parents of wayward children and give both the parent and child community sentences like cleaning up the neighbourhood.
It would bond parent and child, and also ensure parents perform their role of nurturing their offspring, thus bringing up a better crop of future leaders, to avoid immediate and future embarrassment.
Recently, a HIV positive man pleaded guilty of defilement and therefore, only got 150 days in prison, because the 16-year-old victim had willingly followed him to his home!
Young lass
What law was applied? Didn’t the judge understand that she is a minor and knew no better? Perhaps the young lass were dressed in tights or a mini skirt and a crop top, and thus were judged to be of loose morals. Little wonder then that teachers are having a field day with all the fresh guileless pretty young things. And it seems, it’s their mothers who dress them in the latest fashions, but do not instill a sense of decorum and restraint before releasing them into the big bad world.
The police are no better. They are trying to close down saunas because they are chief cause of increased HIV prevalence as they encourage infidelity.
Apparently when two strangers of opposite genders share a hot enclosed space while only clad in a bath sheet, temptations overtake them and an assignation must be engineered. And again, that if a person is not happy in a relationship, they always seek fulfillment elsewhere doesn’t make it any better.
