• Up to 30 per cent of 12- to 18-year-olds in coastal areas engage in casual sex work
• The Tourism Professionals Association is enlisting cooks, waiters, receptionists and guards in the war on child sex tourism
As Kenya's tourism industry performance rises, so has a stain associated with the sector: child sex tourism.
The last two years have posted a record-high number of arrivals. 2018 and 2019 peaked at unprecedented highs of 2.02 million and 2.04 million arrivals respectively.
Sector earnings in 2019 grew to Sh163 billion, up from Sh157 billion the previous year. This has fuelled hopes we could soon be on course to hitting increased annual earnings to Sh175 billion.
On the other hand, sexual exploitation of children in tourism and travel has escalated, stoked by the economic windfall.
Thanks to the boon, communities have turned a blind eye to the social decadence the industry spawns. For instance, along the coast, where foreign and domestic travellers flock annually to sample the sandy beaches and other attractions, many teen girls are immersed in the illicit sex trade.
According to a Unicef study titled 'The Extent and Effect of Sex Tourism and Sexual Exploitation of Children on the Kenyan Coast', up to 30 per cent of 12- to 18-year-olds living in coastal areas are involved in casual sex work.
It means up to an estimated 15,000 girls in these areas are facing sexual exploitation in tourism at irregular intervals or seasonally.
Other reports have pointed to complicity of communities where adolescent girls are even encouraged, directly or indirectly, to sell themselves to tourists, partly due to poverty.
Efforts to curb this particular form of sex tourism have yielded dismal results so far.
Tourist hotels, for instance, have signed a code of conduct to declare their will to protect children.
However, a combination of weak enforcement, conflict of interest, corruption and perpetrators’ cunning ways have rendered the regimen ineffective.
SENSITISATION TRAINING
It is in this context that the industry has now opted for a new approach. The Tourism Professionals Association, a fairly new group formed with the backing of the law, is now pushing industry practitioners to undertake a Continuous Development Programme.
This includes mandatory training on preventing children's sexual exploitation. TPA secretary Dr Sam Ikwaye explained its requirements to the Star.
“For one to become a member, the first thing you have to do, apart from other professional trainings, is sensitisation on the protection of children in travel and tourism,” he said.
TPA's 700 registered members have taken the online course, which aims to empower professionals to take individual responsibility on the matter. The training is in partnership with The Code, a multi-stakeholder international awareness initiative on the protection of children in travel and tourism.
“Practitioners are trained on how to identify the vice, how to report it and how to protect vulnerable children. That is going to empower the professionals,” Ikwaye said.
The secretary expressed hope the new approach will be effective, compared to the past strategy of having tourist hotels merely pledging commitments to uphold a code of conduct.
The shortfall of this strategy, he said, is that often, responsibility is left to investors or hotel owners, who are more concerned with the bottom line rather than ethics.
“If hotel owners sign the code of conduct but the practitioners in the industry are not empowered, they will ignore these issues. People will not want to disrupt business or to hurt their clients,” Ikwaye said.
“But when this sort of empowerment is done, then we hold our professionals accountable because now they have the knowledge and the confidence to stop the practice from happening. This is the only way we are going to tackle this problem.”
A 2016 sub-Saharan Africa regional report found shortcomings in the willingness and capacity of individual countries to implement ratified international conventions. The report was titled the 'Global Study on Sexual Exploitation of Children in Travel and Tourism'.
“National-level research found that, while adequate child protection laws and policies have been enacted in most countries in the region, enforcement remains a huge challenge,” the report stated.
The study was conducted by ECPAT International and the Africa Child Policy Forum, and it covered five African countries, including Kenya.
“Moreover, corruption in some settings compounds these difficulties and results in an environment where perpetrators can act with impunity,” it added.
ACCOUNTABILITY AND SANCTIONS
On the other hand, as an independent sector body, TPA is mandated through the Tourism Regulatory Authority to moderate the industry. In this capacity, the association now seeks to register all practitioners working in the sector, from executives to low-cadre employees.
Once registered, members could then face individual liability in case of violations. For instance, those who fail to flag or report cases of child abuse will face disciplinary actions and their memberships might be suspended. When blacklisted, they would not be able to find employment in the sector.
“And that’s why we are saying everybody in the industry should become a member of the association. Everybody should be trained and everybody should be given sanctions,” Ikwaye said.
Pollman's Tours and Safaris operations director Mohammed Hersi said that with industry players coalescing around a professional body, the campaign will receive added impetus.
“It has been long overdue because all along, we didn’t have a professional body just like in other industries,” said Hersi, who is also the chair of Kenya Tourism Federation.
“On matters of child sex tourism, we are at the forefront and are addressing these issues and have decided to focus on what is within our control.”
However, he accused NGOs monitoring the phenomenon of exaggeration and feeding off old reports.
“They keep reviving old reports and pushing these narratives in the media. For example, a recent report claimed 30,000 children are affected in hotels. I would like to challenge them to prove such numbers,” Hersi said.
He blamed misreporting of sex tourism statistics on people failing to distinguish between adult commercial sex work and child sex abuse.
“What we can take action on is where minors are involved. And we have no powers to arrest or prosecute. Once a case has been flagged, it is up to the police to take action,” he said.
The Tourism Professional Association estimates there are between 5,000 and 10,000 industry practitioners. It believes that when all these are eventually registered, it would be comparably manageable to address some of the stubborn barriers perpetuating the abuse of minors.
Private villas, for instance, have long been suspected of being havens for sex predators due to the discreet nature of their operations, which makes it hard to regulate them, compared to mainstream tourist hotels.
But even villas are manned by sector practitioners, TPA says, and if engaged in empowerment programmes and accreditation, they, too, will become agents in fighting child sex tourism.
“When you go to hotels, for example, you will get a cook, a waiter, a front desk officer, a guard, et cetera. And when you go to villas, you will also find some professionals,” Dr Ikwaye said.
“So if we want to solve this problem, we need to empower all these people so that wherever they are, they can have a network to curb this vice. It will not matter whether they are in a villa, homestay or anywhere else.”
Edited by T Jalio