View related articles View Crossmark data 'They are a shame to the community … ' stigma, school attendance, solitude and resilience among pregnant teenagers and teenage mothers in Mahama refugee camp, Rwanda

This paper explores how Burundian adolescents in the Nakivale refugee settlement, Uganda, experience umwidegemvyo, loosely translated as "freedom", with regard to their sexuality. We draw on ethnographic research conducted between August and November 2017 with adolescents aged 13-19 years. Our research included in-depth individual interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation. We present a context-sensitive appreciation of "freedom" and its social implications for adolescents' sexual and love relationships. We show how adolescents attribute their sexual experiences and practices, including experimental sex, stress-relief sex and transactional sex, to the freedom experienced in the refugee context. Yet they also view this freedom with ambivalence: while some degree of freedom is desirable, too much is referred to in terms of kutitabwaho n'ababyeyi, loosely translated as "parental neglect", implying a lack of parental involvement, care and provisioning.

Based on ethnographic research among Burundian refugee boys and young men in Nakivale refugee settlement in Uganda, we explore how boys and young men in the camp, guided by the longing for a better life, aspire for onward migration and develop strategies based on their knowledge of relevant legal frameworks. Given that onward migration under the UNHCR framework is possible for only the most ‘vulnerable’, we highlight the negotiation strategies adopted by some boys and young men to support their ‘process’, based on sexual vulnerability related to being in same-sex relationships. Notwithstanding the deprivation and bleak prospects, we thus propose to look at the refugee settlement also as a space opening chance for vital transformation. At the same time, we point out that the restricting frameworks seeking to foster protection of refugees, may, in an environment hostile to same-sex relations, unintentionally render refugee boys and young men more vulnerable to gendered exploitation.

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In Rwanda, sexual activity with and among adolescents under the age of 18 is a criminal offence. This is justified to reduce abuse and adolescent pregnancies. Despite this, the Burundian Mahama refugee camp in Rwanda is registering an escalating pregnancy rate among girls 13 to 15 years old. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted from December 2017 to April 2018, this paper shows how pregnant adolescents and adolescent mothers navigate punitive legal structures to protect their baby’s father by concealing his identity. In a challenging socioeconomic context with limited opportunities, silence provides pregnant adolescents and adolescent mothers with a strategy to protect their boyfriends from jail and to access humanitarian assistance available to single mothers. I suggest that silence can be a self-care strategy to negotiate and navigate temporalities as they seek to manage the circumstances in which they find themselves, whilst hoping for a better future for themselves and their children.