Transcript
The director of the Fiji Women's Crisis Centre Shamima Ali says the high number of teenage pregnancy cases doesn't surprise her. Ms Ali says she has dealt with young mothers desperate for help daily.
"When we did the National Survey on family violence in Fiji, about 16% of women surveyed said that they had their first sexual experience before the age of 15. We have to address the issue of incest, of sexual abuse of young people within their own homes with people that they know."
The president of the National Council of Women Fiji Tauga Macanaitaba has been working with victims of incest. She says the issue is getting too big to handle.
"There's a lot of incest. We [NCWF] continue to advise our member organisations to provide advice to women, young women on protection, but we've been doing that for a long time and these numbers have increased."
Ms Ali wants the schools to step up, as she feels they're not doing enough to help the young people.
"The education system has to produce a realistic kind of, you know, life skills and talking about reproduction health and so on. You have to have teachers who are very confident to talk about these things and it has to be done, you know, everyone on the same page kind of thing, so I don't believe we're doing enough of that."
However the Methodist Church's spokesperson, the Reverend James Bhagwan says the education system is doing its bit.
"Our schools in Fiji, we have family life programs. They learn about their bodies. They learn about how babies are made. That's not the issue. The issue is understanding and the learning of being able to value themselves. They're receiving messages outside of the environments that we can manage and support through the mass media, through the internet. People talking and singing about what you can do with your body."
Mr Bhagwan says the issue is there isn't enough positive messages in Fiji for adolescents to value themselves.
"They're receiving messages outside of the environments that we can manage and support, in terms of through the mass media, through the internet, which teaches them a different value and these are places that they look up to. They see people talking and singing about, you know, your value is what you can do with your body. Those sorts of things."
Mr Bhagwan stresses that open communication is needed in families to help tackle the issue. He says that having these conversations would be a big challenge for the older generation, to communication with the youth.
"To communicate that in a way that our young people can understand to value their bodies, to value relationships, to understand when our young boys and young men are buying in to this sexual commodification of women and unfortunately when our young women and our daughters and sisters are also buying into that, thinking that that is the right way, so we need to be able to tackle that in a way that our young people can understand it."
Ms Macanaitaba says there's a disparity between families in the rural area and families in the urban zones.
"The villages I know the parents have a lot of time for their children after school and there's a lot of protection provided for the girls, but in the suburban areas as in other parts of the world, parents are working and the children come home and are not supervised and they're left on their own to make decisions."
The statistics showed that the Northern division had the highest number out of teenage pregnancy cases and the Eastern division the fewest.
