The Multimedia group has done a quick backflip on an obnoxious “beauty pageant” of underage girls in a highly sexualised moral trigger dubbed “Miss Kidi”, after it had been roundly condemned by angry Ghanaians.
The contentious pageant which was scheduled to be aired on Multimedia’s Joy Prime featured objectified young girls dressed in revealing bikinis, heavy makeup and donned with adult-like wigs was pulled after angry social media users drew a correlation between the event and the nibbling global paedophilia agenda.
“Joy Prime wishes to apologise to its cherished audience for the last episode of the Miss Kidi Ghana which showed contestants wearing bikini…We have immediately suspended the airing of the show,” Joy Prime’s Channel Manager wrote in a statement.
However, Joy Prime gave a hint that it would not totally scrap the show, saying: “We are working with our third-party content providers to review the production process.”
In April this year, controversial Ghanaian actress, Rosemond Brown, aka “Akuapem Poloo” was jailed for three months by an Accra Circuit Court for posing naked on her Instagram page with her half-naked seven-year-old son.
She was jailed for “obscene material and domestic violence,” as the court claimed it was using the sentence as a deterrent to adults who may want to sexualise underage kids.
In a similar move against child sexualisation, Netflix, the popular online streaming service was in August 2020 forced to remove promotional images which showed girls posing in skimpy outfits in a new film called “Cuties”.
The poster for the French drama, along with a trailer, had sparked online disapproval and a petition calling for Netflix to drop it. Netflix had later apologised for the inappropriate promotion.
“We’re deeply sorry for the inappropriate artwork that we used for Mignonnes/Cuties. It was not OK, nor was it representative of this French film which won an award at Sundance. We’ve now updated the pictures and description,“ read an official apology by Netflix.
The anger against such objectification of underage kids is a global pushback against what is proven to be an insidious agenda by paedophiles.
In 2006, a discussion paper by the Australian Institute, think tank conducting public policy research on broad socio-economic issues, linked the commercialisation of child sexuality to paedophile circles.
This view was captured in a discussion paper titled: “Corporate Paedophilia, Sexualisation of Children in Australia.”
Australia has been quite vocal against this growing trend. In 2016, The Australian newspaper published an article that described the trend as “an insidious form of abuse, often used by paedophiles to groom their victims.”
Ghanaian social media critics think it is not enough for Joy Prime to simply apologise, but with the precedence set by the Akuapem Poloo criminal trial, the promoters of the Miss KIDI pageant should be put to trial.
Mabel Acheampomaa Acheampong, the Chief Executive Officer of Miss Kidi Ghana launched the contentious pageant in February 2021, saying the event seeks to give kids a good foundation to launch their beauty pageant ambition at a younger age.
Ms. Acheampong said the platform would nurture aspiring female kids and secure better future opportunities for them. “Most children have the passion for pageantry but don’t have the opportunity to demonstrate their talents. So we want to use this platform to change the lives of these young ones and give them a good foundation in pageantry,” she said.
The event targets kids between the ages of 5 and 12.