GHANA: “PUNISH GAY STUDENTS”

Ghana’s education ministry has promised to crack down on students caught engaging in gay or lesbian “practices”.

According to XYZ News, the ministry said that action was being taken to “stamp out homosexuality that has crept into several senior high schools”.

The threat follows a report concerning a young girl who was apparently forced to leave her school because “she faced intense pressure from friends” at the school “to practice lesbianism”.

“It is a big problem and it is an issue that nobody is happy about,” Paul Krampah, Public Relations Officer for the Education Ministry, told XYZ News.

“Those who engage in homosexuality and lesbianism, I mean these are practices that we don’t condone in our parts of the world. We as officials of the Ghana Education Service shun such practices and we would not condone them in our educational institutions.

“So when the culprits are found out we will punish them according to the rules and regulations that guide the schools,” Krampah said.

This is not the first time that homosexuality has been a concern of the Ghanaian education system.

In April, more that 50 students were expelled from two high schools after it was claimed that they were engaging in homosexuality and lesbianism and were ‘recruiting” other students.

In 2011, the country’s education ministry, through Krampah, said that it was training teachers to “educate students [about] homosexuality and its adverse consequences”.

“We are very optimistic that things will change and the incidence of homosexuality in the country will be a thing of the past,” he said at the time.

This was again in response to bizarre hysteria that homosexuality was, like some kind of epidemic, on the rise in schools in the country.

Under Ghanaian criminal law, consensual same-sex sexual activity between men is illegal, with penalties including imprisonment for three years.