The Gift of Agency: Sexual Exchange Scripts among Nigerian Youth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the practice of directly exchanging goods for sexual intercourse using data from 36 focus-group discussions with youth living in rural southern Nigeria. Conceptualizing this practice as a sexual script, the authors conduct a deductive thematic analysis framed by the broader context in which sexual exchange occurs. Combining scripting theory with an analysis of the form of the payment, it was found that the cultural script of exchange supports girls' agency. However, at the interpersonal level of practice, this script often loses out in conflict with the cultural scripting of male control. The shape of this practice is influenced by intrapsychic scripts (e.g., sexual violence is an option), interpersonal resources (e.g., family money), and cultural scripts (e.g., stuff and status bring friends). In the final analysis, sexual exchange is found to be a script that both enables and restricts agency. It is a power niche for those with limited social and economic power, enabling them to seek and access material goods, social status, and sexual experience. It is also a means of coercing unwanted sex via peer and parental pressure, poverty, and a context of gender inequality. Implications for HIV prevention are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".