Teenage girls in Sierra Leone are increasingly selling sexual activities and engaging in relationships with older men in exchange for mobile phones, a new report reveals.
According to the report by Save the Children, the desire to own fashionable mobile devices is a key driver of childhood “transactional sex” in Sierra Leone, reports the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“Mobile phones represent everything that an adolescent associates with being young, hip and fashionable. They are part and parcel of the idea of what they want to become, and to get them they engage in risky sexual behaviour,” said Krystle Lai, research author.
Girls – often with little knowledge of sexual health issues – seek out relationships with older and wealthy men, and engage in unsafe activities in a bid to acquire mobile phones, the report found.
“Young girls are driven to seek older, richer men who can afford to buy them mobile phones, but the economic power in these relationships is unbalanced and influences the bargaining power of using a condom,” Lai said.
Once a mobile phone has been acquired, girls are often forced into continuing the habit of transactional sexual activity in order to pay for credit top-ups, upgrades and maintenance of devices.
Lai said there is a worldwide increase in teenage pregnancy and early contraction of sexually transmitted diseases – including HIV – as a result of rising levels of transactional sex between girls and older men; and that many of the girls questioned under the study had little knowledge of the health risks of engaging in sexual activity with multiple partners.
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