Plight of Kenyan girls forced into prostitution by their parents
A girl forced into sex work.
What you need to know:
- Sex tourism involves travelling and exploration with the objective of engaging in transactional sexual gratification.
- Sex trade has for decades been foundational to the success of the Kenyan tourism industry, but has been adversarial to the rights of underage girls.
The Kenyan tourism industry is predominantly dependent on the influx of foreign visitors to the coastal region, which boasts in excess of 800 hotels and seaside resorts, and accounts for 60 per cent of national tourism activities. Between 1998 and 2006, Kenya was Africa’s leading sex tourism destination, and coastal Kenya harboured about 50,000 commercial sex workers.
The sex trade exhibits an inviting standard of income for shorter working hours, and sustains a voracious degree of autonomy. The trade reduces civil liberties, instigates the risk of sexually transmitted infections, and the void of strict regulations creates vulnerable prey for paedophiles.
Sex tourism involves travelling and exploration with the objective of engaging in transactional sexual gratification. It's one of the most emotive and sensationalised professions in society and like food, it's often incidental to other travel motives. Extreme poverty in remote areas and consistent expansion of urban slums have subsequently imparted a springboard for citizens to persistently trade their bodies.
Sex trade has for decades been foundational to the success of the Kenyan tourism industry, but has been adversarial to the rights of underage girls. Depending on the cash-retention ability, the trade, in Kenya, is classified in three tiers: poverty sex trade, tourism sex trade, and premium sex trade.
In the upper tier are the premium sex traders, who serve local elites, expatriates and international tourists. Their cash-retention ability is optimised by their position in the sex trade spectrum and their money-retention potential is enhanced because they work independently of their volition and aren't attached to predatory pimps and devious brothels.
Sex workers in this category are commonly from the white-collar echelons of society and possess conventional incomes and established cash flow. They foster commercial sex work to supplement their occupational earnings as doctors, secretaries, teachers, nurses, businesspeople or company executives. To them, being in the sex business is for consumerism revenue rather than craving survival. Their participation in the sex trade is overtly discreet because their reputation is defined by their graduate profession.
The sex workers in the second tier, the tourism sex trade, serve both international and domestic tourists and in selective cases, are attached to nightclubs, restaurants and bars. Their clientele pays a fee to the hosting facility to aid the sexual encounter and in instances where the sex workers operate autonomously, they conduct their sex businesses in the areas frequented by tourists. Tourists are their principal target market and commercial sexual services are packaged, marketed and vended as part of the tourist product in the facilities they frequent.
Cash-retention levels for sex workers in the tourism sex trade are superior to those of sex workers in the poverty sex trade, which is at the bottom of the three-tier pyramid. Destitution reduces their commercial sex work and customer interaction to a master-servant relationship.
The women's overtures into prostitution are a result of a desperation for survival to earn an income to meet socio-cultural obligations and potentially contrive a reformed lifestyle to enable them to escape destitution. In several cases, women in this category work under pimps or are attached to hotels and brothels that assume the role of procurer. Their attachment to a second party reduces their money-retention capacity. Consequently, their welfare is often in disrepair, and they endure constricted liberation.
A large percentage of poverty sex traders are children whose parents previously served in the sex industry. Most of them emerge from families that have been ravaged by subjugation and lured, enticed and indoctrinated into the sex trade by parents who contravene the conventional decency of parenting and abscond their principle role of protecting their children.
According to Wanjohi Kibicho's 10-year research, Sex Tourism in Africa: Kenya’s Booming Industry, Kenya had about 3,000 child commercial sex workers on the Coast in 1996. With the number immensely increasing through the new millennium. Over 90 per cent of child sex workers are girls, with the exploitative child sex tourism serving both international and local clients.
Cover of Wanjohi Kibicho's 10-year research, Sex Tourism in Africa: Kenya’s Booming Industry.
The child commercial sex workers are induced into the sex industry in many ways. A number of them are beguiled by their parents into private residences, owned by either international or local tourists, under the guise of domestic workers. They are then left at the mercy of their employers, who are child sex predators, and their guardians are paid directly for the sexual services. This evil move by the parents distorts the girls’ perceptions of dignity and makes the reality of immorality more palatable.
According to Kibicho's research, the prevalence of this practice is centred in Nairobi, Malindi, Mombasa and Ukunda. The girls are manipulated and conditioned to believe that the survival of their families is predicated upon satisfying the sexual urges of their employers.
The most organised form of child sex tourism involves employees of popular and politically connected hotels and resorts, where parents of the victims are affiliated as employed staff or previously frequented the facilities as prostitutes. The hotel staff create the perfect vantage point by seamlessly integrating meetings between the girls and the sex tourists.
The tailored incriminating violations occur in correlation with the hotel management and its implementation has been egregiously normalised and is vividly and unashamedly accepted within the context of the tourism culture. The administration of the hotels receive a transactional percentage of the income generated from the sexual encounters. The staff directly involved in such arrangements also earn a commission from the exploitation of the girls and as do the parents, who, in this case, assume the role of the pimp.
The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).
