Taxi Queens and The Rampant Trading of Sex for Free Rides in South Africa

In South Africa, Taxi drivers and their conductors are trading sex for free rides with school girls, some of whom are as young as 10 year old. This is not-with-standing the fact that South Africa is one part of the Africa where HIV is as high as 30-40 percent of the entire population! What this means is that the fight against HIV has completely been lost because, no age group is safe here anymore and the actual spread of the disease has become protracted.

It is not clear whether the authorities or parents are aware of this problem, but every morning, young girls going to school enjoy free rides, save about $1 a day by simply accepting the title of “Taxi Queen” and later in the day, they surrender their bodies to the taxi drivers who shamelessly exploit them sexually.

From the very on set, it looks like a mutual win-win situation, where the taxi drivers use the girls to get their sexual gratifications and the girls in turn think they are also using the taxi drivers to enjoy their free rides to school. But looking at the ages of these girls visa-viz those of the taxi drivers, it becomes clear that it is the young innocent girls here that are being used because they are still incapable of making informed choices by virtue of their ages! This phenomenon of Taxi Queens is a problem that is being down-played by those who are keen to bury their heads in the sand, I am afraid to say here that, South Africa’s future as a nation is already very bleak with regard to the social morals and manner in which HIV is being allowed to spread like bush fire.

At the current standing, young women are the most infected because of the multiple sexual partners they engage in. Secondly, South Africa is one region of the world where rape is statistically perhaps, the highest in the world and some of these gang of rapists are the main sources of indiscriminate spread of HIV. This is further compounded by the alarming rate of cross-generational sex, where men in their 50s with money go for girls as young as 15 years and systematically infect them with HIV! The girls succumb to these enticements because of their objective condition of poverty. Sex in this case is used as a survival strategy by young girls whose biggest anxieties are not the fear of HIV but the fear of pregnancies. When people think like this, the threats of HIV as a killer disease simply disappears and people who should be more concerned about the problem lose urgency of the situation around them.

It is time the authorities not just in South Africa alone, but in many parts of the developing countries, including my own country Uganda, attempted to help the population they lead with laws that at least protect children from sexual predators like the taxi drivers. As long as these young girls continue to crave for material things like designer clothings, mobile phoes, petty gifts, they will always be victims of cross-generational sex. For example, in the case of the Taxi Queens,  one Taxi driver admitted to having slept with close to 1000 different school girls he was able to lure with free rides within a three year period. These are confessions that should immediately jolt parents, governments, civil society organizations and the police to action, but sadly in this case, everybody seem to be looking the other way-completely away from the real problem.