Struggle for a Sustainable Solution: Building Safe Sex-Talk Spaces with a Rural Kenyan Community

Abstract

Linda Tuhiwai Smith's (1999) call to decolonise research processes--and the knowledge acquired through them--spawned a powerful shift in relationships between those who work in, and members to, local communities, by enhancing success through culturally relevant outcomes. This dissertation offers a context-specific example of a decolonising approach to working in partnership with communities. Explored within are activities conducted with members of a rural Kenyan community. Together a traditional East African gathering space, the baraza, was adapted to foster intergenerational dialogue on young people's experiences, and adults' assumptions, of their sexual learning and exposure. Adopting a Freirean conceptualisation of dialogue, the long-term goal of this project is to positively impact the Sexual Health Landscape (SHL) through adapting mabaraza for intergenerational sex-talk on this culturally sensitive topic. Ultimately, the fours cycles of this project resulted in enhanced awareness of community-specific sex-related problems linked to poverty, adolescent pregnancies, gender inequalities, along with violation of, and vulnerability concerning, young people's sexual rights. In this study, I applied a community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) methodology through a critical post-colonial lens. I worked with a trained local research team to gather community contributors' stories of sexual learning and exposure which were approached from a position of transformation. First, we developed a context-specific model from the information gathered to understand the sex-related problems characteristic of the community. This model narrowed our focus on the most significant issues requiring urgent response. Next, the research team and youth participants worked together to design storyboards and a film script as dialogic tools to share their experiences in mabaraza. These tools were springboards for reciprocal intergenerational sex-talk that did not require the verbal input of young people--simultaneously protecting their identity and strengthening their agency. The contextual model effectively widened understanding of community-identified sex-related problems; situating issues within the current post-colonising/neo-colonising context. Results evidenced meaningful ways to pair art-based strategies, which stimulate participatory dialogue in traditional spaces, while fostering community-driven, culturally relevant, solutions for critical awareness of sex-related issues. Finally, this work serves as a roadmap for encouraging community members to find power in the change process, while elucidating the challenges and possibilities for other novice CBPAR researchers endeavouring to undertake this line of inquiry.