Ghana has a Pedophillia and Rape Problem. Why aren't we talking about it?

Abena* is a 13-year-old girl living with her mother and stepfather – a man who is supposed to be her protector and her guide in a place she calls home. But every time her mother goes to the market to sell, Abena’s stepfather orders her to lay down and take off her pantie and then he rapes her. This goes on long enough for her to become pregnant at 13. Her mother finds out.

She goes to the police.
And then, suddenly, it becomes a headline: “Father arrested for defiling 13-year-old stepdaughter.”

For the next few days, there is outrage. Shock. Disbelief. And then the story disappears, replaced by another.

A 43 year old farmer rapes a deaf and dumb teenage girl in Ashanti region 8 students rape a 16-year-old classmate in Eastern region

A police inspector rapes his 14-year-old daughter A pastor in Oyarifa…

Another child. Another woman Another home.
Another violation, wrapped in the same tired language of disbelief: How could this happen?

But it is happening. Here. In Ghana. Over and over again. And the silence and normalization of rape culture enables this to happen repeatedly without redress.

Just the other day, a Ghanaian man was arrested by Interpol for allegedly drugging and raping women, recording the assaults, and selling the videos on Telegram.

It became yet another buzz topic on social media and Traditional media. Zero accountability. Zero legislation. Just another news story.

And yet, no lawmaker has deemed these issues urgent enough to establish something as basic as a sex offenders registry. No system exists to track predators or protect children and women from the threats we see and face, repeatedly, in plain sight.

Meanwhile as a nation, we have been debating a bill that is supposed to protect our “family values”. The sadder irony is that a fully sponsored “family values” conference hosted by Ghana last month to discuss “proper” family values, in fact, has nothing to do with pedophilia or the normalized rape culture we are grappling with as a nation. If we are serious about family values, then rape and violence against women and girls should be at the forefront of that conversation – they are the clearest violations of what a family is supposed to be.

Yet, these grave crimes are not even mentioned.

Instead, we are asked to fear abstract, exaggerated, or entirely imagined threats. These are the issues that command national attention, legislative urgency, tax payers money and public debate.

When I listen to the loudest voices championing “family values,” I do not hear the same urgency about children defiled by their fathers.

I do not hear sustained outrage about rape.
I do not see coordinated legislative panic about femicide.

I do not see emergency conferences being convened to address the fact that children are being violated in the very spaces they are meant to be protected, the nation state being one.

Instead, I hear strange rhetoric about “African values”.

So what do these “family values” that we are so bent on protecting actually look like?

Because the truth is this: the greatest threat to many Ghanaian children is not some abstract moral collapse. It is not an external ideology. It is not a distant cultural invasion. It is the unchecked power, silence, and impunity that exist within our own homes, our own churches, our own systems.

Until “family values” includes confronting pedophilia, rape, and femicide with the same energy, funding, and legislative urgency, then we must be honest about what this conversation really is and what it is not.

If we are unwilling to center the safety of children in our definition of family, then we are not protecting the family. We are rather preserving extreme evangelical ideologies for the sake of foreign interests that have nothing to do with Ghana

–
Nara Mbabe is a writer and youth advocate

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