Comrades:

Please allow me to forward this disturbing news from the Observer:

Commercial sex work
By DO
Jul 8, 2004, 11:13

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A social ill which is inexorably gaining ground in this country is prostitution. And when we say ‘prostitution’ we mean as it includes both male and female adults. Just over a few years ago, Gambians saw this social issue as being the preserve of foreigners: Senegalese, Nigerians, Gunieans and so on. Gambians were oddities in the sex trade.

But now there are more Gambian sex workers in the business. If there is any economic sector that has become Gambianised so quickly, without hitch, it must be commercial sex work.

Gambian youth are now kneee deep in the flesh trade. The seedy corner ‘bars and restaurants’ have become euphemisms for sex joints where men and women ply their bottom wares, if we may use this rude term.

The shift in prostitution is telling of the rise of the issue in the past few years. Then the TDA used to be the informal Red Light area; now the sex joints are everywhere in the suburbs.

In these days of Aids, the sensible conclusion should be that sex work should be falling not rising. Sadly, this is not the case in The Gambia. Therefore, something very pressing must be driving our youth into this deadly business of selling sex for as low as D25!

A more conventional conclusion would be the hard economic times. The rise in the cost of living has forced many to resort to the most extreme means of augmenting their daily expenditures. 

But the very disturbing rise in commercial work may also be the result of the breakdown in the moral and social order that used to frown upon the practice.
Now as long as one has money to show and buy their daily bread, no one cares how it is obtained. Parents, husbands, and wives have lost the moral right to know the source of income of their children or spouses. In fact, in the past the crime was to bring into the house money or material whose source one could not explain now the crime is to go home empty handed.

This is what is killing The Gambia and driving our people into the sex trade, corruption and theft. 
Wealth is now the god that we worship, not morals or anything else.

Prostitution is therefore just one of the many vices that are bedeviling our country thanks to the greed for material wealth.

The story in the London Observer reproduced in this paper says it all: prostitution is gaining ground here, and something must be done to stop it before it singes our country’s moral fibre.

A campaign for moral rearmamnet is needed urgently in this country that would seek to drive away the demon of iniquity and put in its place good morals. 

© Copyright 2003 by Observer Company

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