She said she was Latishia, 16. Regardless of her age she would easily camouflage amidst a group of women.
Latishia was sitting next to me in a public transport vehicle when we struck a conversation. Here we were; travelling in a 14-seater filled with high school students – travelling back to Nairobi after end term – but myself.
Throughout the journey, from Machakos town, Latishia and her girlfriends churned through conversation after conversation. All – or most – revolved around boys and sex.
A breakfast show on radio, riding roughshod over conservative opinion, discussing bedroom innuendo, seemed to egg them along.
The girls squirm and shrieked with excitement every time a lewd lyric played.
'The folly of youth,' a thought crossed my mind.
Among them, one could sense, they shared a sisterhood bond as they discussed, with daylight openness, boy crushes and boyfriends.
"Look," one said, drawing the attention of the others, "this is the message he sent me before that Friday."
In turns, the girls shared their WhatsApp messages: streams of communication with love interests.
Then, probably by mistake, a video with a voice calling for quick ravisher began playing from one girl's phone as she fidgeted to press Stop, attracting cheers from her colleagues.
"Let us see," one called out.
"No. You were not supposed to see that," the girl pushed back.
"Is that what you sent him Girl, you are bad!" another one said, crackling in owe.
It is as the frenzy calmed down that I asked Latishia [whether it was a real name or not I couldn't tell] why the whole group seemed enraptured in fun.
"This is just normal for us," she said. "There's nothing much to it."
"And, are you guys allowed by school authorities to have smartphones," I ask, before she could declare me boring.
"It is a boarding school: how else are we supposed to keep in touch with people" back comes her reply.
A smartphone, in the hands of a young person, is a conduit for communication – even outside normal paradigm. For bourgeois Latishia, and her friends, they're guaranteed unfettered use of mobile phones.
The journey from Machakos was not the first time this writer came across a raucous group of high school students pandering to sexual innuendo with reckless abandon.
A study showing that sexting – sending or receiving of sexually explicit messages, photographs or images primarily through the mobile phone – has driven risky sexual behaviour to an all-time-high among students in Kenya was published two months ago.
"The pace, frequency and impact of sexting on the children's lives is mind boggling. It is a time bomb in our hands," Stephen Asatsa, the principle investigator on the study, told our journalist.
According to the study, by the department of psychology at Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA), 98 per cent of secondary school students in Nairobi County engage in sexting.
The study further finds a correlation between sexting and risky sexual behaviour; concluding that 65 per cent of students who sext daily frequently masturbate; 62 per cent have multiple sexual partners; 40 per cent consume pornographic material and 30 per cent have frequent sexual intercourse.
In contrast, only five per cent of the students who don't sext masturbate. One per cent have sex with more than one person; a similar number have frequent sexual intercourse and only two per cent indulge pornographic material.
Latishia was sitting next to me in a public transport vehicle when we struck a conversation. Here we were; travelling in a 14-seater filled with high school students – travelling back to Nairobi after end term – but myself.
Throughout the journey, from Machakos town, Latishia and her girlfriends churned through conversation after conversation. All – or most – revolved around boys and sex.
A breakfast show on radio, riding roughshod over conservative opinion, discussing bedroom innuendo, seemed to egg them along.
The girls squirm and shrieked with excitement every time a lewd lyric played.
'The folly of youth,' a thought crossed my mind.
Among them, one could sense, they shared a sisterhood bond as they discussed, with daylight openness, boy crushes and boyfriends.
"Look," one said, drawing the attention of the others, "this is the message he sent me before that Friday."
In turns, the girls shared their WhatsApp messages: streams of communication with love interests.
Then, probably by mistake, a video with a voice calling for quick ravisher began playing from one girl's phone as she fidgeted to press Stop, attracting cheers from her colleagues.
"Let us see," one called out.
"No. You were not supposed to see that," the girl pushed back.
"Is that what you sent him Girl, you are bad!" another one said, crackling in owe.
It is as the frenzy calmed down that I asked Latishia [whether it was a real name or not I couldn't tell] why the whole group seemed enraptured in fun.
"This is just normal for us," she said. "There's nothing much to it."
"And, are you guys allowed by school authorities to have smartphones," I ask, before she could declare me boring.
"It is a boarding school: how else are we supposed to keep in touch with people" back comes her reply.
A smartphone, in the hands of a young person, is a conduit for communication – even outside normal paradigm. For bourgeois Latishia, and her friends, they're guaranteed unfettered use of mobile phones.
The journey from Machakos was not the first time this writer came across a raucous group of high school students pandering to sexual innuendo with reckless abandon.
A study showing that sexting – sending or receiving of sexually explicit messages, photographs or images primarily through the mobile phone – has driven risky sexual behaviour to an all-time-high among students in Kenya was published two months ago.
"The pace, frequency and impact of sexting on the children's lives is mind boggling. It is a time bomb in our hands," Stephen Asatsa, the principle investigator on the study, told our journalist.
According to the study, by the department of psychology at Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA), 98 per cent of secondary school students in Nairobi County engage in sexting.
The study further finds a correlation between sexting and risky sexual behaviour; concluding that 65 per cent of students who sext daily frequently masturbate; 62 per cent have multiple sexual partners; 40 per cent consume pornographic material and 30 per cent have frequent sexual intercourse.
In contrast, only five per cent of the students who don't sext masturbate. One per cent have sex with more than one person; a similar number have frequent sexual intercourse and only two per cent indulge pornographic material.
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