The Conversation We Refuse to Have

The shock was immediate and widespread. Social media erupted. People were horrified, angry, full of questions. There were demands for investigations, calls for accountability — aimed at the school, at the administration, at whoever was responsible.

But almost nobody was asking the most uncomfortable question of all.

Rwanda’s 2025 Demographic Health Survey results, reported by The New Times, show that 8% of girls aged 15–19 have been pregnant — up from 5% just a few years prior. That is not a school problem. That is not a government problem. That is, first and foremost, a parenting problem.

Yes, some of those pregnancies are the result of rape, coercion, or exploitation by adults in positions of trust. That is a crime, and those cases must be prosecuted with the full weight of the law. Let’s say that clearly. But even in those cases, the question that keeps me up at night is this: did that child have a parent she felt she could run to? Did she have someone at home she trusted enough to say something terrible is happening to me? Because if the answer is no — that silence, that distance, that closed door — that too is a parenting failure.

A teenager is still your child. She is still under your roof, under your watch, under your responsibility. The fact that she is navigating a world of hormones, social pressure, smartphones, and the most intense emotional experiences of her life does not make her less your child. It makes her more in need of you.

Let’s dismantle the most common excuse first: “It’s not our culture to talk about these things.”

This is, with great respect, not entirely true — and the research actually backs this up. A study on parent-child communication in rural Tanzania found something fascinating: grandparents, in particular, were traditionally the primary sex socialization agents for grandchildren, and they communicated with remarkable openness across gender lines. That village wisdom — that knowledge of the body and of relationships was something to be passed down intentionally, within trusted relationships — was not absent from African culture. It was systematically eroded, largely by the arrival of European missionary Christianity, which fused sexuality with shame in ways that were foreign to many pre-colonial African traditions.

What we now call “our culture” is, in many cases, a colonial inheritance we have mistaken for an ancestral one.

The second excuse is religious. “Our faith does not allow for these conversations.” But consider Islam, a faith followed by millions across Africa. Far from prohibiting sex education, Islamic tradition actively places it on parents as a duty, to be carried out gradually, age-appropriately, and before puberty — because by the time a child reaches puberty, they are considered accountable for their choices, and it is the parent’s responsibility to have equipped them. There is nothing in the Quran or Bible that says “thou shall not seek sexual health information until the night before your wedding.” The silence is ours, not God’s. And Christianity, properly understood, is equally a tradition of truth-telling — of equipping those in our care with the knowledge they need to live wisely and safely in the world.

Here is the reality no parent wants to face: your silence is not protecting your child from information about sex. It is simply ensuring that you are not the one providing it.

Your teenager is already receiving sex education. It is coming from pornography, which now reaches children as young as 10 and which presents a version of sexuality that is degrading, often violent, and almost entirely disconnected from love, consequence, or emotional reality. It is coming from peers who know as little as they do but speak with enormous confidence. It is coming from social media, where everything is performance and nothing is true.

Your child is already in the classroom. The question is only whether you are one of the teachers.

And here is what the evidence, including a major sub-Saharan Africa review, consistently shows: parents who have open, honest conversations with their children about sexuality raise children who are more careful, not less. The myth that talking about sex encourages sexual activity is exactly that — a myth, and a dangerous one. Informed young people make better decisions. Children who can talk to their parents about sex are more likely to delay sexual debut, more likely to use protection when they do become active, and crucially, more likely to come to you when something goes wrong.

That last point is everything. The 16-year-old at Camp-Kigali hid a pregnancy for nine months. Think about what that required from her. Think about the fear, the isolation, the weight of carrying that alone. Now ask yourself: what kind of relationship, what kind of home environment, makes a child choose that over turning to a parent?

Many of us, when we do attempt these conversations, make one fundamental error: we talk to our teenagers as if they are still the wide-eyed angels, toddlers we once had complete control over. We speak in abstractions and ideals. We say “wait until you’re married” as if that is a complete sentence. We talk only about consequences — pregnancy, disease, shame — as if teenagers are incapable of hearing the full truth.

Here is the full truth: sexuality is biological, emotional, spiritual, and profoundly complex. Your teenager’s body is doing things she didn’t ask for. She is experiencing desire she doesn’t know what to do with. She has probably already encountered sexual content online. She may already have questions about her own experiences that she is terrified to ask anyone. She is not a child — and yet she is also not yet an adult. She is somewhere in between, trying to figure out who she is, and desperately hoping that someone she trusts will help her make sense of it all.

A conversation that only speaks in prohibitions will not reach her. She already knows you disapprove. What she needs is to understand why — not in moral abstractions, but in the language of lived human experience. Talk about the biology: the hormones, what they do, why the body feels what it feels. Talk about the health risks: pregnancy, disease, the very real way they can alter the course of a life. Talk about the thing nobody talks about — pleasure, and the fact that it is real and powerful and not something to be ashamed of, but something that requires wisdom to navigate. And talk about the spiritual and emotional weight of physical intimacy: the deep connection it can create, and the equally deep wounds that come when it is stripped of that connection.

This is not an inappropriate conversation to have with your child. This is the conversation that might save her life. This is the conversation that might set his principles.

A word on the role of schools and the state: yes, sex education should be part of every curriculum. But school sex education, at its best, can only provide information. It cannot provide relationship. It cannot be the place your daughter runs to at 11pm when she is scared and confused. It cannot be the voice she hears in her head when she is in a situation that is escalating beyond her comfort zone.

Only you can be that. Only home can be that sanctuary.

And if home is not a sanctuary — if the first instinct is to shout, to shame, to punish — then you have not protected your child. You have just ensured that next time, she will not come to you at all.

It does not have to be a formal, one-time “talk.” In fact, it should not be. The most effective conversations are ongoing, low-pressure, and woven into the natural flow of daily life. A news story like the one in Kigali this week is an opening. A scene in a film is an opening. A friend’s situation is an opening. These are moments where you can say, without lecturing: “What do you think about that? How do you think she must have felt? What do you think led there?”

Listen more than you speak. The goal is not to download information into your child — it is to open a channel that stays open. So that when she is faced with a real decision, in real time, your voice is one she has already learned to trust.

Start before puberty. Adjust the conversation as they grow. Be honest about your own humanity — you do not need to pretend you emerged from adolescence with perfect judgment. In fact, your vulnerability might be the very thing that makes her feel safe enough to be honest with you.

And for God’s sake, talk to your sons too. Research consistently shows that African parents communicate about sexual health far more with daughters than with sons — because we believe girls bear the consequences. But boys are not passive bystanders in teenage pregnancy. They are participants, often equally lost, equally in need of guidance, and far less likely to receive it. Maybe the girl at Camp-Kigali was impregnated by a young boy, who is equally dealing with feels of guilt, shame, and fear far beyond what he was prepared for. That boy had parents too. And somehow, that boy was not informed enough to do better and did not feel safe enough to also seek his parents’ advice.

The outrage that followed this week’s news is understandable. It is right to be angry. But let’s make sure that anger is aimed accurately — not just at the school, not just at the system, but honestly, at the mirror.

Teenage pregnancy does not happen because teenagers are broken or immoral. It does not happen because teenage have abandoned ancestral values. It happens because they are human beings navigating enormous biological and emotional forces, often entirely alone, because the adults who love them most never found the courage to say: “Let’s talk about this.”

That courage is what your child is waiting for from you.