Re-enrolled teenage mothers' lived experiences of sexuality education in the context of child marriage in Turkana South Sub-County Secondary Schools, Kenya

Abstract

Child marriage continues to rob girls of their right to education across Kenya's arid and semi-arid counties, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in Turkana South Sub-County, where bride wealth, chronic poverty, and pastoralist tradition collide with a school system meant to protect them. This study asked a different question than most before it: not how many girls this happens to, but what it feels like to live it. This study was anchored on three objectives; 1. To explore teenage mothers' lived experiences of the content, timing, pedagogy, and classroom climate of school-based sexuality education; in Turkana South Sub-County.  2. To interpret the meanings teenage mothers attach to sexuality education and its perceived relevance to child marriage, pregnancy, consent, rights, and continued schooling. 3. To examine how gender relations, family expectations, economic conditions, community norms, and school structures mediate those experiences and meanings. Adopting a hermeneutic phenomenological design informed by Heidegger's philosophy of being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, and van Manen's lifeworld existentials, the study set out to describe, interpret, and contextualise teenage mothers' own accounts of sexuality education and child marriage. Re-enrolled teenage mothers, aged 15-19 years, drawn purposively from five public secondary schools, shared their experiences through in-depth individual interviews; data saturation was reached at the fifteenth participant. Data were interpreted through van Manen's wholistic, selective, and detailed reading approaches, organised around the four lifeworld existentials: lived body, lived time, lived space, and lived relation.The findings disclose a curriculum experienced as fragmented, reductively biological, and delivered too late;  arriving only after marriage negotiations and pregnancy had already reshaped participants' futures. Sexuality education was taught through pedagogy of discomfort and avoidance, in classrooms where ridicule silenced girls' questions and stigma made re-enrolled mothers feel newly invisible. Participants attached layered, often contradictory meanings to what they had received: a missed protective opportunity, an occasional spark of rights-consciousness and voice, and most consistently a silence around consent, coercion, bride wealth that left them without the language, or the embodied confidence, to refuse. These experiences were mediated by patriarchal authority, a bride-wealth economy that treated daughters as household income, chronic poverty, and community resistance to open discourse, and thinly resourced schools lacking trained teachers and materials. The study concludes that sexuality education, as currently delivered in Turkana South, speaks to an anatomical body rather than a lived one, and enters a world in which the most consequential decisions about girls' futures have often already been made by others. Yet where education did engage participants as rights-bearing, embodied subjects, it opened a markedly different, more authentic sense of self evidence that the phenomenon remains open to change. The study recommends a comprehensive, rights-based, culturally contextualised curriculum introduced earlier in the school cycle; structured teacher training in facilitating sensitive discussion; locally relevant teaching materials; sustained community engagement with parents and elders; targeted support for re-enrolled mothers; and integration with social protection measures that address the economic roots of  child marriage.