Sexuality in Media: Emerging Issues in Africa - Africa Regional ...

Introduction
Kenya like many other developing countries in Africa has been undergoing
substantial transformations in the socio-economic, political and cultural realms.
These changes have been influenced by several factors both internal and
external, including western education and its attendant values, individual
freedoms, human rights and women empowerment among others. These have
seen the gradual breakup of the traditional values and cultural prohibitions. As a
result, the role of elders and significant others in guidance and counseling of the
young have been replaced by other institutions including the school, media,
religion and the peer group. These formal institutions unlike the traditional setup
lack adequate capacity to enforce societal values that were religiously
cherished and observed in the past.
In particular, the foregoing has had the effect of informally liberalizing
individuals behavior and beliefs so that the role of the society as the mirror of
individual conduct is no longer binding. Rather, individuals have gained social
freedoms and rights that they had hitherto been denied by the society; including
the choice of marriage partner, when and with who to have sexual intercourse,
family size, mode of dressing, who to socialize with and in what ways.
Generally, issues of sexuality in terms of sexual rights including access to and
utilization of reproductive health services among others have evovled such that
what used to be taboo is no longer so most especially for the educated youth and
young adults in urban and peri-urban areas.
In all these transformations, the media, both electronic and the print can play a
significant role particularly in demystifying sexuality and sex, and therefore
opening up debate on the same. At the same time, it has been drawing the
attention of the public to the need to discard cultural values that criminalized
discussions on sexuality and related issues including abortion, teenage dating
Coverage Of Sexuality Issues in the Print Media in Kenya
and homosexuality. The media has a powerful influence on all aspects of
society. With this power comes a major responsibility to present the
complexities of human sexuality at all stages of the life cycle in a way that is
accurate, sensitive to diversity, and free of exploitation, sexual/gender-based
violence, and dehumanizing sexual portrayals.
The media can and has with some degree of success helped break down the
cultural taboos associated with sensitive sexual topics and bridged some gaps in
our sexual knowledge. For example, daytime radio and TV talk shows, movies,
and newspaper commentaries reveal a wide range of human sexual expressions
on broad topics such as rape, incest and abortion.
The mass media is becoming an extremely pervasive and omnipresent
institution in African society. It is no longer possible, considering the enormous
degree of media-saturation in our culture, for the media to have zero effect on
any aspect of human life, including human sexuality. Sex in the mass media,
especially on television, is becoming increasingly frequent and explicit; as
many advertisers have come to the realization that sex sells. Viewers can
observe depictions of intimacy and affection, marriage and family life, and
gender roles, as well as suggestive and erotic behavior, right in their living
rooms. On the one hand, the pervasive, accessible, and popular nature of
television makes it an excellent instructor, offering an opportune way to learn
about sex and sexuality without embarrassment.
However, the images on TV can be harmfully limited, stereotypical and onedimensional,
depicting sex as an activity that is only acceptable for the young,
single and beautiful. In addition, sex encounters may be continuously and
erroneously presented as spontaneous, romantic, and risk-free, which is largely
not the case. Many people are being exposed to massive and explicit sexual
messages every day of their lives, probably beginning before they have the
knowledge or sophistication to accurately deal with such complicated content.
In this paper, we analyze the way the print media in Kenya covered sexuality
and related issues during the first six months of 2004.
Objectives of the Study
The aim of this study was to undertake content (discourse) analysis of print
media (specifically 4 daily newspapers and 2 magazines) to determine how