How People Are Wooed Into The Sex Tourism Trade

Tourists who travel to destinations purposely to have sex abound everywhere and the tricks they employ to trap innocent people to engage in their wicked acts are very simple but really works. Many people who never intended to become prostitutes have become so, as they never ever realized they were being wooed into prostitution.

In the Republic of The Gambia, and some other places, these same tricks that were applied by Scandinavian and other Western women into wooing some men into male prostitution are being applied on Ghanaian young men today. This is how the tricks work; a white woman arrives from Europe, and manages to get a young male Ghanaian to help her get around town. That is the initial contract and that is what happens within the first few days. Now as they get along better, she showers gifts on this young man and make promises to get him over to Europe when she returns and then go ahead to seduce the young man and they will engage in multiple sex at the beck and call of this white woman. When it is time for her to go back home, she reaffirms her promises made earlier but also informs the young man that her friend will also be visiting Ghana and that he should “make her happy”.

So the first woman leaves and the second woman arrives after a few weeks and the same scenario is reenacted. This will go on over time and by the time the young man gets awake, he has been sleeping with many tourist women. In Ghana, a lot of young men are involved and more are getting involved by the day and the professional ones have managed to give themselves an identification by wearing dreadlocks and will usually hang around the beaches of Accra especially Kokrobite and the arts centre. For those of you residing in Accra who frequent places like busy Internet, you may have observed that most of the young white women who come around move with young Ghanaian men wearing dreadlocks. I wish to say that, not all dreadlock spotting men are involved in this. Sex tourism exist in Ghana and is gaining popularity very fast but sadly, anytime there is news about sex tourism in any part of Ghana in the media, there arise people who will condemn the publication ignorantly. It is part of my business to interview tourists to Ghana and some of them do confess having engaged in sex both homosexual and heterosexual. As for our young women, majority of whom are from neighboring Nigeria, and Cote d’ voire together with their Ghanaian counterparts, are nothing but professional prostitutes in business. Some below age 18.

Another emerging trend is the use of chat rooms. Sex tourists who wish to visit Ghana would visit chat sites on Ghana and gradually establish friendship with some of our unsuspecting youth and build their confidence over time, the conversation slowly gets to the promise of marriage, that our youth see as opportunity to travel to Europe or America. These on-line fiancées would definitely arrive here, engage in multiple sex with our youth and then go back with the promise of going to get travel documents ready and that will be the end of that story. The very cunning ones would normally date more than one person before arrival so as to have big fun. It is extremely difficult to get people to understand that they are being exploited unknowingly. This is very dangerous especially these days of HIV / AIDS. Our people should be alert and be let into such dangerous relationships.

Richard Kwame Debrah (Tourism Analyst)

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.