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KAMPALA, Uganda (Reuters) -- A Ugandan member of parliament has pledged to reward girls for their chastity by paying their university fees if they are virgins when they leave school, a local newspaper said on Wednesday.

Bbaale County MP Sulaiman Madada said any girl in his district who wanted to take part in the scheme aimed at promoting girls' education would be given a gynecological examination by health workers to check they were virgins.

"The criterion is that a student must be a virgin and from Kayunga district," he told the state-owned New Vision.

The MP did not extend his offer to young men.

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[ 22 July 2005: Message edited by: Nikita ]

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"Our children should be told the risks they face if involved in early and unprotected sex," Madada said.

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[ 22 July 2005: Message edited by: James ]

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Originally posted by James:
H'mmm. When I saw the thread title, I presumed the subject would be some USian institution like, say, Baylor. Presumably if they can pull a scholarship for being gay, they could as easily award one for being ... chaste.

[ 22 July 2005: Message edited by: James ]

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And ok, maybe I was the first one to make a lame joke. But maybe we could stop the lame jokes right here.

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skdadl wrote - Ok: maybe someone should send up a signal to the guys.
And ok, maybe I was the first one to make a lame joke. But maybe we could stop the lame jokes right here.

I shall return with link to another recent babble thread about serious politics in Uganda.

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Ok: maybe someone should send up a signal to the guys.

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There are only two posts on the entire thread that I'd remotely construe as "jokes". Don't know that either of them is "lame". And only one is by a "guy".

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skdadl wrote - A little fun? At the expense of young women in Uganda?
Think about it.

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Those who have the patience -- and the good faith -- to read Granola Girl's link will come to this passage:

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As African women's gumption has met with a trickle of influences from the outside world, a version of feminism has grown progressively alongside extreme levels of sexual violence, the battle against HIV-AIDS, and the aftermath of African wars, all of which have changed the role of women in surprising ways.

A package of new laws has been presented to Kenya's parliament to give women unprecedented rights to refuse marriage proposals, fight sexual harassment in the workplace, reject genital mutilation and prosecute rape, an act so frequent that Kenyan leaders call it the nation's biggest human-rights issue. The most severe penalty, known as the "chemical castration bill," would castrate repeatedly convicted rapists and send them to prison for life.

In neighboring Uganda, thousands of women are rallying this month for the Domestic Relations Bill, which would give them specific legal rights if their husbands take a second wife, in part because of fear of HIV infection.

Eleven years after the genocide in Rwanda, in which an estimated 800,000 people were killed, women in the country hold 49 percent of the seats in the lower house of parliament. Many of them are war widows who have said they felt compelled to rise up in protest after male leaders presided over the 1994 slaughter of Tutsi tribal members by the Hutu majority.

Across the continent in West Africa, Nigerian women are lobbying strongly for the nomination of more female politicians, including a president in 2007, saying that men have failed to run the country properly.

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There is a continuing point to be made, alongside our first reactions to the horrific oppression that women in other countries face:

Our outrage and our jokes both stem from our privilege. Real change for women in countries like Uganda (a severely traumatized nation) is not going to come from noisy, comfortable people like us. It is going to come from those women in Uganda who are learning, slowly, how to rally against their own politicians.

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skdadl settle down.

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Screw you.

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Originally posted by Yukoner:
Some girls may prefer to 'work' their way through school.

/coat

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Cheap sexist jokes stop here. Read the rules.

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I'm shaking my head here, and not in a good natured way, though the latter may have as much to do with it being late on a hot Friday afternoon as anything.

R.B. and Bacchus were both, as I read them, observing as to how impractical this disgusting policy is in it's observation. I was commenting that sadly, we should not assume that such an awful thing can happen only in a far-off place like Uganda.

None of those observations are jokes, let alone cheap sexist jokes, nor are they at the expense of young African women.

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Originally posted by skdadl:
BH: I already made that bad joke, and have contritted for it. Let's have no more bad jokes.

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I must start reading the whole thread before I reply.

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skdadl wrote - Screw you.

We're in the feminism forum. Cheap sexist jokes stop here. Read the rules.

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And now we've got men giving her obnoxious lectures on the finer points of humour.

How be you guys just STFU and respect the wishes of the women posting in this thread (like Nikita and skdadl, both of whom have shared their discomfort with some of the jokes posted) up to this point?

You know, it is conceivable that if you have nothing beyond patronizing off-topic lectures to post, then you could probably post nothing at all.

[ 22 July 2005: Message edited by: Michelle ]

You'd think that people would get the picture by now that girls sometimes either don't HAVE hymens, or they lose them.

The other thing I'm wondering is...I wonder how Ugandan feminists are reacting? I've heard stories about some feminist activists (can't remember which African country) who have been really pushing for an end to forced marriages of young girls, who end up having to drop out of elementary and secondary schools in order to be married off and start families. Although I don't like the idea that a woman is judged by her sexual activities, I wonder if, at the same time, it might be an incentive for parents of girls to think twice about marrying them off before finishing school.

Check this one out in particular - it looks pretty fantastic. Sigh. I don't often wish to be a millionaire but every single one of these organizations are struggling for funding.

[ 22 July 2005: Message edited by: Michelle ]

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Although I don't like the idea that a woman is judged by her sexual activities, I wonder if, at the same time, it might be an incentive for parents of girls to think twice about marrying them off before finishing school.

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I think it's reasonable to be concerned about the problem, but this MP's solution still strikes me as wrong-headed -- pretty paternalistic and crass (and as others have noted above, impractical because it is predicated on something that is close to a superstition).

We all want girls everywhere to stay in school. We probably also want younger teens to understand the real advantages of delaying sexual activity, but I don't know whether we want to make it taboo, exactly. It's a problem, though, that genuine education on these scores works so slowly.

Free university tuition for women, though: why does that have to be tied to anything? Shouldn't that be incentive enough?

In any case, I was reading the web site of that association of female doctors in Uganda, and it seems like a pretty darn good organization. They promote all types of contraception (including emergency contraception), and they also provide abortion support services. Which, of course, means that they wouldn't get any US funding, I suppose. And one of their major mandates seems to be education of female children, adolescents and adults in women's health, contraception, HIV education, and other issues of well-being.

I was hoping to see whether I could find any feminist reactions in Uganda to this particular education-for-virgins proposal, but I didn't find any.

[ 23 July 2005: Message edited by: Michelle ]

I think that organizations that promote chastity before marriages, socially conservative churches etc would all earmark their scholarships not necessarily for someone who was a virgin but someone who currently felt that abstinence was the best path.

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Doesn't the idea of requiring a gynecological examination, specifically to determine whether a woman has an intact hymen, the results of which examination will then become public -- doesn't that sound a little creepy to you, Hailey? Perverted, even?
If I were a teenaged girl, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near some old fart who wanted to know things about my hymen.

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BTW, I know, please don't hate me, but I found those jokes funny. I also found that both men IMO clearly were disgusted by this action on the Ugandan gov't.

[ 23 July 2005: Message edited by: Stargazer ]

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Originally posted by Hailey:

I don't know that I'd use the terms creepy or perverted but I think it's wrong.

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How else can virginity be determined?

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Believing the integrity of the person that is speaking to you is really the only way. If someone tells you whether or not they are a virgin you have to accept that information based on their word.

Gynecological examinations are certainly not full proof as some young girls lose their hymens through non-sexual activities like horseback riding, gymnastics, etc. In cultures or families that value virginity - in the physical sense - often young girls are prohibited from certain sports.

Women with intact hymens may even have had a surgery so an intact hymen is not necessarily an indicator of not having had sexual relations.

There is no full-proof method, you just have to believe the reporter.

My point was not to defend this - I am just saying it occurs even within our own culture.

[ 23 July 2005: Message edited by: Yst ]

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Originally posted by Hailey:

Another example in the middle east is in turkey which is more modern than some other countries in that area of the world. Girls are expelled for not being a virgin. http://shr.aaas.org/aaashran/alert.php?a_id=188

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Originally posted by Hailey:

There is no full-proof method, you just have to believe the reporter.

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