By Charlene Smith
Should we put our children in chastity belts? That's what one South African manufacturer would prefer, especially when children as young as six are talking about having sex, "in the bush, in the bathroom, under the bed". They say, according to research done in Zambia, that "sex feels nice".
Is such research "disgusting" as some in Kenya have told Rob Pattman of Britain's Open University research team? Or is it a legitimate expression of one of the things parents fear most: the sexuality of their children? He says adults impose a "wished innocence on children" and this carries serious consequences when children are abused or face HIV.
The Sex and Secrecy conference held at the University of the Witwatersrand this week heard papers on issues ranging from bizarre chastity belts for children tuned into vehicle hijack tracker systems, to hate crimes against lesbians, the use of music videos to spur discussion with adolescents about masculine roles to myths about rich men that have sex with poor women and then pay them "coffin money" - because Aids has been passed on.
The Fourth Conference of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society saw more than 300 delegates from around the world present more than 150 papers over three crammed days. It became clear from a number of papers that when issues around sexuality are repressed, particularly open discussion between parents and children - deviancy, risk-taking behaviour and sexual violence is more likely to emerge and even predominate.
"Protecting children" by refusing to share sexual information, or that about illness, rarely did that and was often code to protect parents. Henry Baringye, a Ugandan paediatrician, argued for the right of children to be told they were HIV-positive.
"There is a conspiracy among people to 'spare them' , but actually they are not sparing the children, they are sparing the adults." He spoke of a mother who told her child that her bad skin was due to smallpox. "The child asked me if she had smallpox, I told her it had been eradicated.
"Then she said, the children at school don't want to sit next to me, they say I have Aids, but my mother says I have smallpox, why does she lie to me?" He says the reasons are most often because the parents don't want their own HIV status to be known, or they fear the child will be stigmatised or physically or psychologically traumatised, but, "it hurts them more to be lied to".
One HIV-positive 15-year-old was put onto anti-retroviral medication without being told why because her parents wanted the truth kept a secret. She lived with her father, and when her mother died of Aids she was not told. She became distressed because letters to her mother went unanswered, her schoolwork deteriorated and she began rejecting her medication.
It was a year before she was told of the death of her mother, but two years later, her father still refuses to allow her to be told of her HIV status, "her drug treatment is failing and there is now a concern that she is involved in risky sexual behaviour".
Violence against women was a major theme. Katarina Jungar and Elina Oinas of the Abo Akademi University in Finland argued that many feminist writers portrayed women in developing nations as "passive victims... the sad women of the South versus the powerful women of the North". Delegates argued that much sexual violence was "not about normative masculinity but about complicity" - among men and women in not acting to expose or prevent violence.
Lucy Steinitz, a Namibian delegate, expressed concern that while considerable attention was given to men attacking women, too little attention was given to more prevalent violence - men harming other men. And as an example, Sasha Gear of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation presented a fascinating paper on sexuality in men's prisons.
She said that new prison inmates were often forced into gangs. A member of the Big Five gang, known as the doctor, would often determine gender roles by listening to a man's pulse. A certain beat would mean that a man would be classified - usually for the rest of his incarceration, "as Free Moscow, or woman" but if "your blood is full, you are a soldier".
Aggression was seen as manliness. A typical path for being "made a woman" is to accept acts of kindness. "Women" or "wyfies" are allocated "husbands" who provide materially for them and have the right to expect sex on request.
Gear's research provides a fascinating glimpse into male attitudes towards themselves and women. "Men" are aggressive providers, "women" are submissive. Accepting gifts from a "man" is often seen as giving him the right to sex, consensual or not. And perceived weakness such as poverty or fear, or attempting to be equal to the "men", is punished with rape.
These conclusions appear to be borne out by the work in the lowveld of the University of Pretoria's Isak Niehaus, who reported that women were often raped after accepting food or gifts and then refusing sex.
Considerable time was spent on trying to figure out masculinity.
Claudia Ford, a Wits academic who adopted a five-month-old baby who had been raped, and is the mother of three adult sons, asked: "How can we socialise young black men to be non-violent when private acts of aggression appeared to be the only outlet their fathers had for expressing their anger against legalised social denial and dehumanisation?
How can we socialise young white men to be non-violent when public acts of aggression were sanctioned the myth of their fathers' superiority of gender and race?" She believes that parents have a powerful role to play in bringing up children who reject violence.
At the closing session of the conference organisers complained that none of the papers dealt with joyful sex or the pleasures of heterosexual sex. But then again, the conference theme, Sex and Secrecy, suggested sex that carried shame or taboos.