Selling the future
In this information age, with people having access to diverse sources in the palm of their hands, very few things shock us anymore.
We have become immune to some of the horrors that we face as a society each day.
But even the most hardened among us would have been horrified by what is happening along the Zambia/Botswana border, where girls as young as ten are selling themselves to truckers.
This place of horrors, at the construction site of the new Kazangula Bridge, which is co-funded to the tune of US$161 million by the Botswana and Zambian governments, sees sex workers from Namibia, South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe plying their trade.
Young sex workers are using the opportunity presented by massive delays being experienced at the border post, where snaking lines of trucks, up to 6km long, are parked for up to 12 days at a time.
“Some parents are reporting this to my office and I can personally see for myself. When it is evening I can see some of these young girls coming from the villages making their way to the trucks; some are as young as 12, sometimes 10,” a local headman told Namibian Sun recently.
Besides an immediate and urgent need to tackle the underlying issues of poverty and despair that are driving these girls into sex work, we also need to examine what kind of men, who are themselves fathers and breadwinners, would sleep with a 10-year-old girl.
The thought of doing that should rightfully be abhorrent for men and the fact that some of these truckers are doing this is disgusting indeed. The response of local authorities, which includes imploring these men to use condoms, is far from adequate.
How do you allow adult men to steal your future, without using every mechanism at your disposal to assist these young girls and lead them on a better path?
This vicious cycle needs to be broken at all costs and Namibia should take this issue up with its neighbours. It takes a global village to raise a child and the Land of the Brave should voice its strongest concerns.
Or have we become like animals, and our sexual gratification trumps everything else?
We have become immune to some of the horrors that we face as a society each day.
But even the most hardened among us would have been horrified by what is happening along the Zambia/Botswana border, where girls as young as ten are selling themselves to truckers.
This place of horrors, at the construction site of the new Kazangula Bridge, which is co-funded to the tune of US$161 million by the Botswana and Zambian governments, sees sex workers from Namibia, South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe plying their trade.
Young sex workers are using the opportunity presented by massive delays being experienced at the border post, where snaking lines of trucks, up to 6km long, are parked for up to 12 days at a time.
“Some parents are reporting this to my office and I can personally see for myself. When it is evening I can see some of these young girls coming from the villages making their way to the trucks; some are as young as 12, sometimes 10,” a local headman told Namibian Sun recently.
Besides an immediate and urgent need to tackle the underlying issues of poverty and despair that are driving these girls into sex work, we also need to examine what kind of men, who are themselves fathers and breadwinners, would sleep with a 10-year-old girl.
The thought of doing that should rightfully be abhorrent for men and the fact that some of these truckers are doing this is disgusting indeed. The response of local authorities, which includes imploring these men to use condoms, is far from adequate.
How do you allow adult men to steal your future, without using every mechanism at your disposal to assist these young girls and lead them on a better path?
This vicious cycle needs to be broken at all costs and Namibia should take this issue up with its neighbours. It takes a global village to raise a child and the Land of the Brave should voice its strongest concerns.
Or have we become like animals, and our sexual gratification trumps everything else?
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Namibian Sun
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