Public Agenda (Accra)
Jean Yaw Twum Lukaz
23 March 2007
opinion
Accra — The trend of international student educational tourists' influx to Ghana has been marked by their association with children and adolescent 'any-work boys' who act as their guides, servants and companions.
Gradually, Ghana's tourism industry has experienced a growth in such practices whereby it has degenerated into gay paedophile sex tourism.
Tour operators in Ghana belong to a professional group called the Tour Operators Union of Ghana (TOUGHA) whose members are professionally trained to handle tour activities and advertise them as such. However, single tourists and other backpacker-mass-tourists slipping into Ghana have resorted to preying on truant and delinquent kids idling on the beaches and streets of our cities and communities by luring them with money, immigration abroad and other gizmos.
In most of the advanced countries body contact with kids can be an offence related to paedophilia, especially if you are not a relation. So finding themselves in a free-for-all environment in Ghana, such touchy-feely tourists seize the rare opportunity of walking hand-in-hand with children and adolescents in Ghana.
Research by some child NGOs in Ghana have documented a lot on child sex tourism in Ghana as a creeping menace to our society and nothing seems to have been done by any of those related agencies to the issue. In some cases, parents have even condoned the involvement of their kids in gay paedophilia and child sex for what will trickle down onto their plates. Unfortunately, these kids are whisked into hotel rooms for sex. Some of the hotel and lodging operations in Ghana are pimping for such tourist and using child sex tourism as a promotional tool for their businesses.
The tourism sector in Ghana, both public and private, do not seem to be doing much or taking the issue seriously and neither those agencies responsible for the protection of children. It will be in the right direction if TOUGHA initiates an advocacy campaign on the issue at hand with support from child-based NGOs, Ministry of Women and Children's Affairs and the Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations. An example in point is what has been done in Vietnam where recently, taxi drivers were empowered and trained to handle and report suspected cases of child sex tourism activities.
On Friday, 6 January 2006, BBC news reported a sex tourist, Alexander Kilpatrick, a father-of-two, arrested in Milton Keynes has been jailed indefinitely for making trips to Africa to abuse poor children. The 56-year-old made "harrowing" films of the abuse, said Judge Roger Chapple and is serving at least five years and four months for 17 counts of sex offences.
He took advantage of the abject poverty and the circumstances in which children in Africa and other countries find themselves. He plied them with meals, treats and alcohol and then sexually abused them in the most appalling ways. Kilpatrick transferred films of the abuse onto CD-Roms before editing them, setting them to Elvis songs, and then labelling them with his victims' names.
A divorcee, Kilpatrick was arrested in May 2005 when a French holidaymaker from Ghana spotted him handing out toys during his latest trip. He was subsequently deported and flown back to Heathrow.
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