In June of this year, the management of Ola Girls’ Senior High School in Ho in the Volta Region revealed that elements of the LGBTQ+ community have infiltrated the student population.

According to the headmistress, Regina Coffie, unidentified persons are using some students as proxies to recruit other students into the LGBTQ+ community.

“There is one in the final year who was exposed to someone working with the army in Takoradi. The person is a lesbian, we have big people who are out there looking for girls,” she had said at a PTA meeting.

Her concerns form part of the general basis upon which the Anti-LGBT+ bill is being propounded on.

Giving credence to this, Ningo Prampram MP, Sam George said he has evidence that members of the LGBTQ+ community are in schools actively recruiting members for the community.

According to him, the Anti-LGBTQ+ bill he’s championing in Parliament is geared towards halting the perpetration of the recruitment of children into the LGBTQ+ community by prescribing harsher punitive measures against LGBTQ+ advocacy.

He said, “We’ve seen the advocacy of LGBTQ+ in our secondary schools. They’re setting up recruitment drives in our secondary schools, they have pimps in the secondary schools who they pay money to…we’ve done a lot of research and recently the headmistress of OLA girls came out to complain giving credence to the point that we’re making, and it’s not just in OLA girls it’s widespread.”

However, reacting to the claims, the former Country Director of Amnesty International Ghana, Robert Amoafo, says existing laws govern what material children are allowed to be exposed to.

He explained that in relation to the recruitment of children in the LGBTQ+ community if the claims are true, the Childrens’ Act of the 1992 Constitution is well equipped to deal with the issue appropriately.

He thus called for the implementation of the existing laws instead of creating new ones.

“That is why I say that then there is a law already that exists. Those are children as you have mentioned, and no adult is expected to engage in any sexual activity with a child. So whatever sexual activity is; heterosexual, homosexual, our laws clearly criminalise that.

“So why don’t we use that law against that? If people are recruiting, what are they recruiting for? If they’re telling the children something that is wrong, that you know that they shouldn’t hear, like any other thing that we say that children shouldn’t hear, we should stop them from doing that by ensuring that we implement the existing law,” he said.

He added that, “Why do we have to create another law that would seek to criminalise an individual for just being who they are? For going to work every morning and being a human being?

“And the only part of their life that anybody or a parliamentarian will be interested in is the sex that they’re having and therefore we’d want to criminalise them for having sex and pushing this agenda of people recruiting which is false.”