On March of 2009 I wrote a blog about sexual abuse in Africa starting with a cry for help that I received through my email from a young lady who had been kidnapped and was forced to be a sex slave.\u00a0 Unfortunately, despite me contacting many organizations that could have helped the young lady, we could do nothing until she told us where she was.\u00a0 She never responded.\u00a0 Since then I\u2019ve become more involved in trying to find people to start Lamplighter chapters in that continent.<\/p>\n
The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Africa calls child sexual abuse in Africa a silent health emergency. In The Lancet <\/em>today, (May 9, 2009) Avid Reza and colleagues present survey data on sexual violence in girls in Swaziland.\u00a0 In this survey, one of the few nationally representative samples from Africa, a third of girls and women aged 13-24 years reported some form of sexual violence before age 18 years.<\/p>\n The Kingdom of Swaziland, sometimes called Ngwane, is a landlocked<\/a> country in Southern Africa<\/a>, bordered to the north, south and west by South Africa<\/a>, and to the east by Mozambique<\/a>. Swaziland’s economic growth and societal integrity is highly endangered by its disastrous HIV<\/a> epidemic, to an extent where the United Nations Development Program has written that if it continues unabated, the “longer term existence of Swaziland as a country will be seriously threatened\u201d.\u00a0 The infection rate in the country is unprecedented and the highest in the world at 26.1% of adults <\/sup><\/span>and over 50% of adults in their 20s. \u00a0The widely held African belief than an infected male can be \u201ccleansed\u201d of HIV through sexual intercourse with a virgin puts younger girls at particular risk in communities with a high prevalence of HIV.<\/p>\n The Lamplighter Movement currently has two chapters in Lagos, Nigeria and one in Nairobi, Kenya.\u00a0 Our Nigerian Lamplighter facilitator recently submitted two names of women who live in Nigeria (which has a population of 18 million) that want to start chapters. One has already joined our movement making our total chapters 50 in six countries.\u00a0 Child sexual abuse in Nigeria is being called the raging storm. She also has one in Sudan that is interested.\u00a0 In one of my recent emails from her she was studying at an institute that caters to the needs of sexually abused children in India.\u00a0 There were 75 sexually abused children in the campus that were sex slaves to temple masters, have been rescued and are now being integrated back into society.\u00a0 She was taking a month long training on Gender Diversity and Transformation.\u00a0 While there she spoke with two women who wanted to start chapters in India.\u00a0 We applaud her efforts as she is leading the Lamplighters into the lives of so many who have been sexually abused.\u00a0 I have mailed her several copies of REPAIR Your Life: A Program for Recovery from Incest & Childhood Sexual Abuse<\/em> so that those in her chapter can begin to work the program.\u00a0 At her request I am mailing both her and VISTHAR, Institute for Peace and Development Initiative several copies of REPAIR For Kids<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The \u201cdark continent\u201d is a former name for Africa, so used because its hinterland was largely unknown and therefore mysterious to Europeans until the 19th century. Henry M. Stanley was probably the first to use the term in his 1878 account Through the Dark Continent. Today it is politically incorrect to use that term even though the inhabitants themselves often refer to it as the \u201cdark continent.\u201d\u00a0 The Lamplighters is working hard to bring light into that darkness.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n