Influence of Mobile Phones on Adolescent’s Sexual behavior: the case of secondary students in Dar es Salaam city, Tanzania

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of mobile phone use on adolescent’s sexual behaviour. It was driven by the observation that despite an increase of mobile phones use amongst adolescents there were still knowledge gap on the relationship between mobile phone use and adolescent sexual behaviours. The study was carried out in Dar es Salaam City from January to February 2010. Data was collected from a sample of 256 adolescents. Self administered questionnaires were used to collect primary data. The findings show that majority of the adolescents were mobile phone users since 95 percent of the respondents were reported to be users of mobile phone during the research period, mostly using it for voice calling and text messaging. Half of secondary students were sexually active and reported to have sexual partners. Ninety percent of respondents with sexual partners use mobile phone to communicate daily with their sexual partners. Chisquare test revealed statically significant relationship between frequency of communication with sexual partner and ever had sex (p=0.000). The majority of the students, particularly female students reported to be more approached for sexual offer through mobile phones by both people they hardly knew and people they knew. Few respondents reported to either ever receive or send sexual suggestive material through mobile phones. To those who ever received or sent mainly received or sent to friends of sexes, sexual partner and people they hardly knew. The effects of mobile phone on adolescent sexuality in this study were pregnancy, school drop-out, and exposure to pornographic materials and many never met friends’ hence increased STIs risk and HIV/AIDS. The study concluded that use of mobile phone has an influence on adolescents’ involvement in sexual behaviour particularly behaviours that would increase their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, early and unplanned pregnancies and abortion. However, the problem can be reduced if appropriate measures are taken. Among the major recommendations include parental control over their kid’s use of mobile phones and government should take deliberate measure to control the use of mobile phone during schools hours.