Heads in the Sand or Plain Charlatan?

This week the media has been on the case of young people with stories of sex and related subjects. Predictably each media house has gone out to find what they would think was the juiciest of the underage sex stories to tell. (Are these houses managed by one person?)

So one came up with the story of a study which found out that young people have started engaging in sex at a very tender age and most of them are procuring abortion. The reporter said that in his time underage sex was unthinkable yet now things are 'shagalabagala'. Well that is what I too heard in the '80s and '90s when I was growing up. Our parents and adults always told us their days were saintly days! Never mind that this reporter appeared to be no older than 23.

Another media house went to the air with the story of young people buying and trying out sex enhancing drugs. They even had hidden cameras and managed to get viagra and other sex enhancement drugs from a street vendor. She was shocked that these drugs were so available to young people. She even wondered how come the youth knew about them. Well this is someone who works for a TV station that advertises Zoom in national free viewing TV in broad daylight. Zoom and many other such drugs are actually available over the counter in of all places supermarkets!!! In my view you do not need a hidden camera to find out that people both old and young buy them all the time. And again remembering my own youth, I started hearing about a drug called 'kukumanga' (sp) when I was in class five. I wonder why anyone would be surprised that kids know about these things.

But a third TV was not be left out of the 'competition' on kid sex stories. They went to bed with the one about brothels and strip joints which they said are surprisingly available in Nairobi. O boy! Is that really news? stories of karumaindo and riva rodi are almost as old as Nairobi itself. And Strip joints? They have full color A3 size posters all over the streets of Nairobi!

But maybe its not only Kenyan media. A friend sent me a youtube link with a story told by this American journalist about underage prostitution in the Kenyan coastal towns. Where kids as young as 13 are being paid by rich old men from Europe to engage mostly in unprotected sex. I would have been shocked had I not also been sent a website hosted in the US of A calling itself child models website. In reality it was full of pedophile fodder. Kids some barely 3 years pictured naked or with the subject of the photo being their panties or lower torso. Someone has to be acutely sick to in the first place host such a site, update it and even collect money from subscribers. What even of the subscribers themselves! Does that even begin to compare with the 13 year olds of the Kenyan coast?