Zero Tolerance, Sex Tourism in Kenya
A report on the harrowing cases of young girls being subjected to abuse.
Article written by: Jamal Osman
Sahra’s story is one of sadness, distasteful, despair and cruelty. The six-year-old Somali child living in Mombasa, Kenya, had gone through an experience that a child should never go through. Her tale shows how poverty could take away ones dignity and future, a testimony to how evil people take advantage of child’s desperation.
My colleagues and I met Sahra last year while making a story about sex tourism in Coastal Kenya for a local TV. It was a harrowing journey, which took us from nightclubs where European men pick up 12-year-old African girls; to an orphanage where children like Sahra have found sanctuary after sexual abuse by foreign tourists. A journey into a world of cruelty and desperation, a world we could scarcely have imagined. And both talking and filming with children brutalized and traumatized by their experiences has been very difficult.
We found the six-year-old girl in a church orphanage, where she told her care takers about her visits to hotel rooms and being filmed for pornographic videos. And the charity worker who rescued her said that, based on a medical examination, the abuse probably began at the age of three. A medical doctor who examined the young-Sahra added “she had some whiplike lashes on her back” According to Eve Ngoroge of the Women’s Resource Network, the young girl “---had a vaginal injury as well, and there was some sodomy as well. She says it was “muzungus” – white men. More worryingly, Eve told us that Sahra’s grandmother was trading her child through pimps to make ends meet. The grandmother allegedly knew that white men were sexually abusing the child. Sahra had been suffering for about three years before she was rescued.
However, Sahra’s case is not an isolated one. All along the coast, we heard similar distasteful stories of children abused by tourists who are now younger then ever. We didn’t have to go far to find evidence of such cases. Visiting the Mombasa’s Coast General Hospital (MCGH), which is home to the region’s only public clinic specializing in sexual violence, was heartbreaking to say the least. The clinic is unique in confronting a scandal many would rather ignore and its admissions book reads like an astonishing chronicle of cruelty.
