“Girls are raped all the time.”
“Girls as young as 10 are raped in the community.”
“Girls get pregnant as early as 13 — mostly due to rape.”
These were the matter-of-fact statements I heard, over and over, during focus group discussions with girls between 10 and 17 years old in Mathare, an informal settlement in Nairobi, as part of my doctoral research on adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights.
It puzzled me how routine and normalized sexual violence appeared to be spoken of. Not with outrage, but with resignation. These statements reflect the complex and often unsafe environments that girls navigate, demonstrating that one-size-fits-all solutions are not only inadequate, but they must be highlighted and actively challenged.
Joan Njagi
Alongside the accounts of rape, another term surfaced repeatedly: kudanganywa — a Kiswahili word meaning “to be tricked” or deceived. Girls talked of being lured into sexual encounters by promises of small amounts of money, gifts, food and favors. It was clear a lot of these encounters were not consented to in any meaningful sense.
After several sessions, I wrote in my field journal:“They speak without agency.” Later, I added: “They speak as if their bodies and lives do not belong to them.” These reflections stayed with me, haunting my understanding of what it means to grow up as a girl in spaces where sexual violence is both widespread and normalized.
When I asked what kind of messages they received about sex and growing up, the response was almost unanimous: “We’re taught to say no to sex.” This is a message that surrounds them in every sphere of life — at home, school, religious institutions and through community-based life skills initiatives.
“They are instructed to exercise consent, which is limited to saying no, in environments where consent is structurally impossible.”
That response, more than any other, laid bare the disturbing paradox at the heart of many interventions targeting adolescent girls: they are instructed to exercise consent, which is limited to saying no, in environments where consent is structurally impossible.
In settings where sexual violence is common, where poverty limits choices, and where adults often look the other way, “just say no” becomes not a form of empowerment, but a stark reminder of the absence of real options.
What does it mean to “say no” when “no” is not respected, or worse, leads to more harm?
The mantra of “say no to sex” is a hallmark of abstinence-focused sexuality education that still dominates in many Kenyan schools and communities. It is, however, profoundly disconnected from the lived experiences of girls in urban informal settlements, where the risks of rape, coercion and transactional sex are shaped not by poor decision-making, but by power imbalances, poverty and restrictive socio-cultural norms.
This messaging is rooted in discourse that often focuses on individual behavior, on what girls can do to avoid “risk.” However, this lens ignores the structural conditions that make that risk inevitable and shifts responsibility from communities and institutions to the girls themselves.
And the burden of prevention becomes theirs to carry. Don’t go out late, don’t wear that, don’t talk to him — say no. And if something happens, maybe you didn’t say it clearly enough. Maybe you didn’t say it at all.
The “say no” messaging, while claiming to protect girls, not only fails to do so, it deepens silence and shame, isolates and perpetuates a culture of victim-blaming. This messaging places the burden of protection on girls, while little effort is made to engage boys and young men, who often are excluded from conversations about growing up and left to participate only voluntarily, if at all.
In my conversations with these girls, I did not hear apathy. I heard resilience, expressed in a language shaped by survival. I heard discomfort with silence, even if the words lacked power. For these girls, speaking out, naming rape, deception, abuse and violence was itself an act of resistance. But resistance should not fall solely on their shoulders. Protection, justice and freedom must not remain distant luxuries.
“We must equip boys with tools for empathy and accountability, not just girls with tools for defense.”
If we are serious about adolescent girls’ rights, we must stop offering solutions that place the burden of protection so heavily on them in the name of agency, while overlooking the ways such agency is constrained.
We must start by asking what our systems, schools, families, health services and laws are doing to protect and uphold their dignity. We must invest in interventions that shift norms around masculinity and sexual violence. We must equip boys with tools for empathy and accountability, not just girls with tools for defense.
We must end impunity for perpetrators and address the culture of silence that allows abuse to fester. And yes, we must teach consent — but in ways that acknowledge the structural constraints on choice.
Otherwise, we tell girls to fight battles that never were theirs to begin with, while we set them up to fail.
Joan Njagi is a child sexual abuse researcher with the Sexual Violence Research Initiative. She is a Public Voices Fellow on prevention of child sexual abuse with The OpEd Project.