Men think about sex 19 times a day

I am surprised that for many of us, one of our fights in this House has been around making sure that we increase the age of consent to sex because we know that there are predators in this country who are busy abusing children. That conversation has not taken place in this House. As we speak right now, the age of consent legally is 12 years, that is what we should be fighting about. We should be sitting in this House and say this is ridiculous.  We cannot have our little girls being abused. But no, you want to spend all your time fighting about access to contraception. You want to fight about issues of access but you do not want to talk about the legal age of consent. If you talk about legal age of consent, trust me, you will have all of us marching in the street because we are sick and tired of our children who are being abused.

Just to conclude, I am getting this emotional because I had an opportunity to sit under Katswe with a group of little babies, some of them HIV positive and looking very stunted. If a child is HIV positive and they have stunted growth, they even look smaller than their age and yet when you sat through and listened to these kids  talking to you about men that come and have sex with them, you would be shocked. I do not want to say they are the men that are sitting here but men have to take collective responsibility for the kind of abuse that they are doing to our young children. For any one man in here to begin to speak against this particular motion is to say you are supporting those marauding men that we are finding in Epworth.

We are prepared to come out of this House right now and spend the night in Epworth and see what is happening to those little babies. They have been traumatised by losing a father and mother.  They are traumatised because the economy does work for them, they have nothing to eat, they are being traumatised by men that come and sleep with them and you want to sit in here and further traumatise that child by saying you are not going to get access to treatment because we want to look good, because we want people to believe that we are the best people that live here, shame on you.  You should actually be ashamed of going into this discussion. I have met those kids, perhaps it is not right for me to give that judgement. We should ask Katswe to invite some of those kids to sit in that courtyard and you listen to those kids speaking.  Then you can come into this House and say in your right mind, with a proper conscience, you can go and sleep and say you would rather have that child die than to have that child go and seek help because you want to look good since you are a Christian.  I am not going to say that I am a Christian but I know that I am a Christian but I also know that I am a sinner.  So, that is not what I am putting in front.   I am asking everybody not use the Bible as a stick to destroy these young children.  If there is anything that we need to talk about right now, it is how we should create a safe environment for these little broken kids that are going to be adults but having experienced a very bad past of abuse.  I like what Hon. Dr. Mataruse said, that hospitals are the places in which they can get both psychological support and physical examinations.  I am a survivor of mental illness and I know what mental depression can do to a person.  I am lucky I survived because I could get access to services but you certainly want to deny this little child anything that can give them an opportunity to at least live and like I said, shame on you.

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