I wanted to know how the whole sex tourism thing worked so I started a series of conversations with some of the young men working in the "tourist shops". I discovered that first the sex tourists were both men and women but it was the men (mostly from Northern European countries such as Germany, Sweden, Norway etc) who "went" for the young girls and boys. I was told that many of the tourists came every year and stayed for up to 3 months living with a chosen boy or girl. In some cases they would even take the child back to their home country. They told me that everyone, the police, government officials, embassies all knew what was happening but did nothing. One of the ways in which the Europeans took the children back to their homes was by promising to give the children an education and support his or her family back home. It was only when the child was in Germany or Norway that they discovered they were in fact to be sexual slaves. One young man told me he knew of someone who was kept prisoner for over a year in Germany before he was able to escape and seek help and eventually he returned to Gambia.
Friday, February 10, 2006
why the devil has more vacation-time than santa: reason number 1,073
The blog, black looks recently put up an entry sex tourism in Africa: (click on link for full story). One of the reasons why this story is so surprising to me is that "normally" when I've read about the concept of sex tourism, it usually occured in Asia, especially urban centers in Thailand like Bangkok. I honestly never knew that this particular kind of thing occured much in Africa. The second aspect which is really striking, is that even though formal slavery has been essentially abolished virtually everywhere, there are still multiple and pervasive ways in which extreme poverty allows the same basic degrading relationship to continue to exist, perhaps in a mutated form.
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