You know a story has made it when it’s on all mainstream news outlets, has dedicated trending topics on Twitter, popular on Facebook and is an intense topic of discussion on street corners. When it even inspires press conferences from religious leaders and what seems to be a thorough investigation from the police, it furthers illustrates its takeover of the Kenyan imagination. All it took was a supporting cast of a couple of women, a foreigner with a camera and the lead character, a dog.
Eleven young women and a Swiss national were last week arrested on suspicion of shooting pornographic video content with a dog In Mombasa. When the story broke, we were accosted with images of the young ladies and the foreigner involved. Our diligent journalists apparently spent over seven hours waiting for the court to make its ruling. In the end”however, the prosecution asked for more time to investigate the matter.
The women have become overnight celebrities with their names being printed in newspapers, mentioned on TV and posted online on websites and social media. The conversations about it have largely revolved around the immorality of the alleged pornographic act, especially because it involved an animal. A majority of the comments frowned upon the said escapade with a call for a crackdown on brothels and prostitution rings and an introspection of the moral decay of our society.
This is not the first time a shocking story from the Coast has made headlines but this particular one has caused more ripples. A couple of months back, one of the local TV stations ran a story of women at the Coast that prostitute themselves in a forest. The women claimed that poverty drove them to sell their bodies for as little as fifty shillings and transact this business under trees and in bushes.
I do not condone prostitution or pornography and I do support the shutting down of establishments that promote such activities. However, I think the society should begin to focus more on helping rehabilitate and empower the women and nowadays, men involved in these activities. It takes a certain level of desperation to engage in pornographic acts with a dog for a few thousand shillings. The level of poverty and/or warped thinking that pushes young women to such acts of desperation is what should be addressed rather than launching moral tirades. At the end of the day, even if all brothels were to be shut down, those who still want to engage in prostitution would still find ways to do so. Necessity is after all the mother of all invention.
As we comment and make fun of these young women and the predicament they have found themselves in, let’s also think about the root causes of some of these vices and figure out practical solutions to them. Otherwise, these sort of things will continue happening. Who is to say that this is the first dog pornographic video to be shot in Kenya?