Kalangala district is struggling with the growing aggressiveness by commercial sex agents who are recruiting more teenage girls into prostitution.
The agents operate on the different landing sites in Kalangala, where they act as main links between commercial sex workers and their prospective clients, who include local fishermen and revelers in bars and other entertainment spots operating in the area.
Tadeo Luwukya, the L.C.1 Chairperson for Misonzi landing site in Bufumira sub county, confirms that they have witnessing an unprecedented rise the numbers of teenage girls, as young as fourteen getting engaged in the commercial sex work.
He explains that the majority of the victims are from the other parts of country, who are brought to Kalangala as attendants in the various entertainment places such as bars, lodges, beaches among others, where brokers recruit sex them.
The brokers, according to Luwukya, are retired commercial sex workers who were pushed out of the trade by either age or diseases, and have now resorted to enrolling teenagers as sources of their continued survival.
He says that the notorious ones have reached the level of using community megaphones to market the business, which is also contributing to increase in the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections in the area.
Josephine Nalunga, the Bufumira sub county council Speaker says that despite the community concern by the high number of young girls engaged in sex trade, they are finding it hard to eliminate the vice because the victims are also evasive to the local authorities that would help them.
She explains that because the Kalangala community is comprised of very few women compared to men, it has been so challenging local authorities to eliminate the social evil, saying that the perpetrators tend to lure their victims with money and eventually conceal the habit and its after effects.
Francisca Nakyeyune, a shop attendant in Kalangala town council, observes that the area usually registers influxes of commercial sex workers in the festive season
She argues that some girls are innocently attracted into sex trade due to frustrations for failing to find employment, a reasonable percentage willingly enrolling for the trade as their primary source of income.
John Baptist Kyambadde, the Officer in Charge of Kalangala Central Police Station, partly blames the prevalence of the problem to wide knowledge gap among the communities. He observes many of the perpetrators of the vice are largely semi literate people who are ignorant about the laws on child abuse, human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
He however says that together with some civil society organizations operating in the area and the Office of the District Probation Officer, they have embarked on vigorous community sanitation campaigns, to enlighten the residents about the protection of girls as well as luring and rehabilitating the victims from the trade.
On a monthly average, he says the Police Child and Family Protection Unit in the area registers at least 10 cases related of sexual violence against young girls from across the 64 landing sites in Kalangala.
