Most child brides reported that, in most cases, the young women were actually forced by their parents to get married once they fell pregnant. To avoid burdening the girl’s parents with the added financial responsibilities of taking care of the coming grandchild, getting married to the responsible man was the only viable option available to the girl. Marriage was easiest when the responsible male partner was agreeable to the marriage. 3.2.4 Materialism/Consumerism An idea that reverberated through the FGD responses was that the young girls were too materialistic and exhibited a very strong consumeristic behaviour in which they chased after the latest clothing labels, music and dining in fast food outlets. This allegedly was so rife to the extent that young women were willing to simply “throw themselves” at any man who could provide for their consumeristic tendencies and materialistic egos. Thus, eloping and subsequent marriage were driven by the need to secure oneself a man who could afford these niceties and could shower the girl with “bling”/ adorn the girl with splendor beyond what the husbands of other girls could afford. Essentially, there was competition among young girls to secure themselves a wealthy man, and thus eloping was one of the surest ways through which the young women-cum brides, could outdo their rivals. A case-in-point is the following story as narrated by a respondent: “…One of those people we know encountered a scenario where the girl eloped and when she got to the boy’s house, the boy said I need to get some food items and he did. While he was away the girl saw the man next door who had a better lifestyle than her boyfriend and she eloped to that man. It was so embarrassing. How does someone do that?” According to respondents, young girls are getting into child marriages because they ignored the advances from young men because they were not rich and had less to offer financially. 3.2.5 Moral decadence and the spread of transactional sex According to most respondents, society was experiencing a general moral decline, and this was clearly reflected in the behavior of society’s young. For example, for girls coming from very poor backgrounds, seducing their teachers appeared to be a sound plan to improve their lives. They end up having affairs for money, and, for many respondents, this indicates the perversity of loose morals across the wider society. Other respondents expanded on this theme, and implicated school teachers in this moral decline and transactional sex thesis, saying teachers took advantage of poor and hungry children by offering them money in exchange for sex. Other respondents blamed the parents for buying very short skirts and other “revealing clothes” for their children, allowing children to take condoms to school, and, generally, being lax when monitoring their children’s behavior. Some respondents thought the blame should be shared between the parents and the children arguing that “Kunyange dai watenga refu anocheka ega” meaning: “Even if you [a parent] buy a long dress, the girl will cut and shorten it herself”. Some respondents lamented the perversity of sexual images and thought in society which made children generally predisposed to sex. Nowadays simple things like swimming were now viewed as sexual activities by children. One respondent posited that in the old days swimming was just swimming, but now, “Zvino ikozvino vakatuhwina vanotobuda vese vaanevana”, meaning “once children go swimming they would engage in sex and they would be pregnant by the time they emerged from the water”. 14