Across Africa, the loudest cries of “protect the children” are too often followed by silence when children are actually harmed — but fury when consenting queer adults exist. Across the African continent, a familiar refrain echoes from pulpits, political rallies, and parliamentary debates: we must protect the children. It is a powerful phrase — emotionally charged, morally urgent, and difficult to contest. It has become the rallying cry behind some of the most aggressive anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns in recent years.
But when we look closely at how this rhetoric plays out in real communities, a troubling pattern emerges. In country after country, queer adults are framed as threats to children — despite the fact that advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights has always centered on consensual relationships between adults. Not children. Not coercion. Not abuse. Consenting adults.
And yet, the harshest public punishments, the most explosive outrage, and the most unrestrained mob violence are often directed at queer people whose only “crime” is existing outside heteronormative expectations. Meanwhile, sexual violence against children — a documented and devastating reality across the continent — is too often treated as an isolated incident, quietly resolved, or met with far less communal fury.
Consider what happened recently in Nigeria. A 23-year-old gay man was lynched by members of his community because of his sexuality. The violence did not end with his death. Those responsible reportedly went on to disrupt his funeral, extending their punishment beyond the grave — denying him dignity in both life and death. In that same week, in that same country, a man accused of attempting to sexually assault two girls — aged nine and three — at their father’s burial was reportedly slapped and handed over to authorities.
Two cases. Two very different responses.
One involved a consenting adult in a same-sex relationship. The other involved alleged harm against children. Yet it was the consensual relationship that provoked mob execution and posthumous humiliation, while the alleged predator faced comparatively restrained community reaction.
This contradiction is not uniquely Nigerian. It reflects a broader continental double standard.
In Uganda, the Anti-Homosexuality Act was defended with the same language of child protection. In Ghana, debates around the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill leaned heavily on claims of safeguarding youth. Across the region, queer existence is framed as recruitment, grooming, or moral contamination — narratives that collapse consensual adult relationships into criminal abuse.
Let us be unequivocal: child abuse is violence. It is a crime. It must be condemned and prosecuted without hesitation. And it is not defined by sexual orientation. Heterosexual men commit the vast majority of documented child sexual abuse cases globally — yet heterosexuality is never put on trial.
When human rights defenders speak of LGBTQ+ rights, we are speaking about the right of consenting adults to live without violence. We are speaking about freedom from mob justice. We are speaking about dignity and equal protection under the law.
We are not speaking about children.
The persistent conflation of queerness with predation is not about protecting children. If it were, communities would mobilize with equal intensity against perpetrators of child abuse. They would not reserve their harshest punishments for adults in consensual relationships.
What we are witnessing is moral selectivity.
The language of child protection has become a convenient shield for prejudice — a way to legitimize hostility while appearing virtuous. It allows societies to perform moral outrage in one direction while averting their gaze in another.
Africa’s children deserve genuine protection — from exploitation, violence, and abuse in homes, schools, religious spaces, and communities. Queer adults deserve protection from lynching, humiliation, and persecution.
These two commitments are not in conflict.
Until we disentangle child protection from anti-LGBTQ+ scapegoating, the slogan of “protect the children” will continue to ring hollow — not because children do not need protection, but because the outrage has been tragically misplaced.
