Radio Drama: Episode one

This week we have plotted the scenes and came up with characters for the first three episodes of the drama series.

We have given each episode a theme and the first episode’s overall theme is “young & sexually active”. What we hope to achieve with this episode is to create a general awareness of the struggles and issues that sexually active young people go through. It is important to understand that we got these story ideas from the real experiences of our group and the experiences of the group members’ friends and family members. Often there appeared to be a lot of stereotyping such as “girls are gold diggers and have multiple partners to pay for material possessions” or “it’s not a fathers place to talk about sex with their daughters or sons”. We’ve had to debate and edit out some of these stereotypes.


So in the series we seek to challenge the stereo types by making the father character to be more involved in their daughter’s life and actually advise his daughter about safe sex. We are hoping to break away from the defined social roles of a mother or a father figure in their child’s life. We hope that people will realize that it does not always have to be the mother who talks to their children about sex.

We also believe if young teenagers who are going through puberty were actually advised well in advance about safe sex practise that would prevent a lot of pregnancies.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about menstruation as young girls tend to hide their periods from their parents as they feel ashamed about it. According to the stories told by our group a lot of young males see girls that are on periods as “sluts” apparently menstruation represents sexual activeness. Obviously this is highly ill-informed and through episode one we challenge these stereotypes.

It appears that man have it easy in the situation of teenage pregnancies. One, the guy’s can easily deny impregnating a girl. Two it is often the girl who has to quit school and look after the child. Three often it’s the girl’s family that has to financially take care of the baby while the daddy’s side does nothing.

These and more are issues we touch on through episode one and I feel strongly about having young males take responsibility for their mistakes. As I mentioned above on many cases the girls bear the burden of teenage pregnancy all on their own. I see this a vicious cycle as those children who are born through teenage pregnancies often grow up without a father figure in their lives.