Coming to terms with sexuality, defining identities and dealing with the difficulties associated with growing up as females, four girls share their experiences of being a teenager in South Philadelphia in a documentary screened by the Douglass Governing Council.
More than 100 University students came to the Douglass Campus Center Monday and watched the film “Girls Like Us,” which followed the lives of high school students Lisa Bronca, Anna Chau, De’Yona Moore and Raelene Cox.
Bronca, an Italian-American attending a Catholic high school, said she originally thinks there is more to love and sex than what she learns in her conservative school, but also thinks that she should remain a virgin until marriage.
But two years later, Bronca’s viewpoints on sex and love change. She does not want to listen to her teachers or mother preaching about abstinence.
“People don’t understand we’re going to have sex anyway,” Bronca said. “They should just come to terms with it.”
School of Arts and Sciences sophomore Kyrie Graziosi said the problem lies in people always telling kids what not to do without ever empowering or giving them the chance to come up with their own ideas.
By the end of high school, Bronca is with a man for five years and planning on marriage.
Moore, a black girl in a performing arts school, lives with her grandmother and is the oldest of many brothers and sisters.
Her grandmother says when she was younger, she had no dreams to become anything; all she wanted to do was have kids.
But Moore is a talented singer and has been singing since the age of three, and she and her friend Khalida are not very interested in boys.
“Maybe God punishes you for having sex before marriage [by giving you a] baby,” Khalida said.
By the beginning of her senior year, Moore is doing well in her music classes.
“She knows what she wants and has a lot of potential,” her teacher said.
But when Moore’s cousin is shot, her grades begin to slip. She fails her senior year and becomes pregnant shortly afterward.
Chau, a Vietnamese-American, tries to blend her parents’ traditional viewpoints on premarital love and sex with the viewpoints of her peers.
“I cannot talk to boys. I cannot walk down the street with boys. I cannot look at boys,” she said.
Chau laments the society’s hypocrisy in differentiating what is acceptable for boys and girls.
“When my brother comes home with hickeys, my parents are proud of him for being a man,” she said. “If I ever came home with a hickey, they’d kill me.”
School of Engineering senior Rayssa Sanchez said she thinks this hypocrisy is what causes young girls to have sex for the wrong reasons.
Women have sex to show that if boys can do it, girls can too, she said.
As the documentary follows Chau through high school, she decides to go against her parents’ wishes and have sex with her boyfriend. She feels guilty, does not enjoy it and decides to stop seeing him and stop having sex for the time being.
Cox is the final girl featured. She has a baby girl in the beginning of the documentary after becoming pregnant at 14 years of age.
“I had sex [for the first time] when I was 12. My boyfriend was 16. I don’t know if it was rape, but I stayed with him anyway,” she said.
She becomes pregnant twice throughout the documentary. While her first pregnancy ends in miscarriage, she gives birth to a second girl in the film.
Cox drops out of school in order to care for her baby. Her mother did too many drugs to be trusted with the care of a child, she said.
“I’m going to let my daughter do and be whatever she wants to. I’m not going to make her do anything,” she said.
Due to having multiple boyfriends, she is not sure of the father of her second pregnancy.
“There’s a reason for this baby; God wanted me to have it. I couldn’t live with killing it,” she said.
Cox moves to the Poconos with her fiancé when she is 18 and spends her days taking care of her two children and his two children.
But her fiancé is different from her previous boyfriends; he does not hit or treat her badly, she said.
“I feel like I still made something of myself. I wouldn’t change the past at all,” she said.
United Black Council President Vanessa Adegbite was surprised to see how little women know about themselves.
“They define themselves based on the men in their lives,” said Adegbite, a Douglass College senior.
President of the Douglass Governing Council Jennifer Kanyamibwa organized this event with the intention of bringing together many diverse organizations at the University to discuss empowering women.
“The only way to progress is for diverse women to come together and understand each other, to empower each other,” she said.
Kanyamibwa, a Douglass College senior, hopes that after watching the documentary and participating in the discussion that followed, different organizations will contact each other and plan programs together with the intention of empowering one another and spreading diversity.
“I think that in each of the characters you can see a little of yourself,” she said.
School of Arts and Sciences junior Brady Yocom realized the four girls in the documentary were aware of the consequences of their actions but chose not to stop.
They were all good people, but one thing led to another and they found themselves in troubling situations, she said.
Valerie Weiss, a School of Arts and Sciences sophomore, believes part of the problem is the way the media has begun portraying teen pregnancies.
“There are two to four drama television shows that follow pregnant teens,” she said. “They kind of make it seem like it’s OK for teens to get pregnant and that it’s easy to raise a baby as a teenager. I feel like they’re giving the wrong message.”
After watching this documentary, many of the students realized they should do something to help girls stuck in similar situations.
“It’s important to take the information we got today and use it to help the kinds of girls we saw in the movie,” said Peggy Yu, president of Alpha Kappa Delta Phi and Douglass College senior.
School of Arts and Sciences sophomore Lisa Goeen agrees.
“We got to college for a reason,” she said. “We need to mentor these girls.”
Thanks : Daily Targum