Now and then, a video of a young girl dancing suggestively to a popular song goes viral on Ghanaian TikTok. Instead of concern, the comment section majorly fills up with laughing emojis, jokes about her “moves,” and adults tagging their friends to watch.
Almost no one asks where her parents are, why she has access to that platform unsupervised, or why grown adults found her performance entertaining rather than alarming. This is the quiet way abuse becomes normal.
Not through one dramatic event, but through thousands of small moments where society chooses to laugh, share, or scroll past instead of asking hard questions.
In Ghana, conversations about child sexual abuse have always struggled against silence.
Families have historically preferred to settle such matters “at home,” often to protect the family name or avoid stigma, sometimes with a bag of provisions or a small sum of money offered as an apology to the victim’s parents.
That old pattern of hushing things up has not disappeared. It has simply found new company in a digital culture that trivialises the same behaviour it should be condemning.
Scroll through comedy skits, memes, and even mainstream radio banter, and you will find jokes about “small girls” being attractive, older men being praised as “sugar daddies” rather than exposed as predators, and school uniforms treated as a costume for adult fantasy rather than a symbol of childhood.
Some Ghanaian musicians have released songs with lyrics that romanticise relationships with underage girls, and these songs still get airplay and dance challenges on social media.
When content like this circulates freely and even gains popularity, it sends a message that such behaviour is acceptable, or at least not serious enough to challenge.
Part of the problem is how normalised these conversations have become in everyday spaces.
In many communities, older men are still referred to affectionately as people who “chase small girls,” a phrase said with a chuckle rather than disgust.
Market women joke about “sugar daddy” arrangements as a survival strategy for young women in tough economic times, without acknowledging the exploitation baked into such relationships.
Even in church settings, cases of abuse by trusted authority figures are sometimes hushed to protect the institution’s reputation, echoing a broader pattern where power shields perpetrators and silences victims.
Social media has accelerated this desensitisation rather than reduced it. Algorithms reward engagement, and shocking or provocative content, including content involving minors, tends to spread quickly because it generates strong reactions.
A clip of a child behaving inappropriately can rack up thousands of views within hours, with very few people pausing to consider the harm of circulating it further.
The sheer volume of such content means people become used to seeing it, and repeated exposure dulls the instinct to react with concern.
There is also a generational gap in understanding what constitutes abuse.
Many Ghanaian adults grew up in households where corporal punishment, inappropriate touching by relatives, or early exposure to sexual content was treated as normal, sometimes even joked about later in life.
Without deliberate unlearning, these same adults may fail to recognise similar patterns as harmful when they see them play out with today’s children, whether online or in person.
Organisations such as DOVVSU and the Ark Foundation continue to push for stronger reporting systems and public education, but their work is often undermined by a culture that still finds ways to excuse or minimise abuse.
Real change requires more than institutional effort.
It requires ordinary Ghanaians, on WhatsApp groups, in trotro conversations, and on social media timelines, to stop laughing at jokes that trivialise a child’s safety and start asking uncomfortable questions instead.
Desensitisation does not happen overnight. It happens one shared video, one careless joke, one dismissed complaint at a time.
Reversing it will take the same slow, deliberate effort, starting with a simple refusal to let anything involving a child’s exploitation pass as entertainment.
SOURCE: ApurumManasseh Wintemah Apurum