#DubaiPortaPotty: what the hashtag hides

#DubaiPortaPotty is a social media hashtag built on a rumour: that young African women in Dubai are paid by rich men to be used as human toilets. It has passed 450 million views on TikTok. When BBC Africa Eye followed the hashtag back to the death that made it go viral, it found no party and no choice. It found a trafficking network, a debt the women could never pay off, and two young Ugandan women who died falling from high-rise buildings in Dubai.

This article discusses sexual exploitation and death. It contains no graphic detail.

What the hashtag claims

“Porta potty” is slang for a portable toilet. Online, “Dubai porta potty” and “porta potty party” are used for men, mostly in the Gulf, paying or forcing women into sexual acts involving human excrement. I explained the term, and what Nigerian survivors told our research team about it, in porta potty parties: what survivors told us about exploitation in the UAE.

The hashtag does something different from the term. It attaches the rumour to particular women - usually African, usually young, often dead - and invites millions of strangers to judge them. The videos under it are parodies, “exposés” and speculation.

How a death became a meme

In 2022 a 23-year-old Ugandan woman, whom the BBC names as Monic, fell from the 20th floor of a building in Dubai’s Al Barsha district. She had left Uganda a few months earlier, promised work in a Dubai supermarket. Her family were told it was suicide. A clip of the fall spread online, her name trended, and she was branded a “Dubai porta potty” girl.

The BBC investigation, Death in Dubai: #DubaiPortaPotty by journalist Runako Celina with Thread Studios, took that story apart:

• The viral videos attributed to her were filmed in Russia, months before her death, and showed a different woman.
• Witnesses described her fighting with someone on her balcony before she fell.
• A second Ugandan woman, aged 21, had died the year before in the same district in similar circumstances. Both women were connected to the same people. Laboratory tests verified by the BBC found no alcohol or drugs in her blood, which contradicted what the police had said.
• Dubai police treated both deaths as suicides.

The hashtag did not cause those deaths. But it buried them. Millions of people watched the rumour; very few watched the investigation. A young woman with a family who loved her became a punchline, and the people who brought her to Dubai were left out of the story.

What the BBC found behind it

The network the BBC traced worked in a way we know well from Nigeria.

The job offer

A recruiter in Uganda found young women on social media, often women under pressure from poverty or family, and offered them jobs in Dubai supermarkets and hotels. The BBC found him advertising forged documents on WhatsApp, including passports and national identity cards.

The debt

When the women arrived, there was no job. They were told they owed between 10 and 20 million Ugandan shillings (about US$2,800 to $5,600) for flights, visas, accommodation and “training”. Every payment went towards a debt that never got smaller. The BBC filmed the man it identified as running the network in Dubai offering women to clients for degrading acts that mirror the viral content. He told the BBC the allegations were false.

The force

Women who resisted faced violence, or threats against their families at home. A former associate told the BBC that women who said no were kept in a room until they agreed.

This is the same model I saw when Stop Trafficking Africa brought Nigerian women home from the UAE from 2020 onwards: a job that does not exist, a passport taken, a debt that is designed never to be repaid. The nationalities change. The method does not.

The online layer

Social media is at both ends of this crime.

At the start, it is where women are recruited. The BBC found the Ugandan recruiter working openly on social media and WhatsApp. Our own casework in Nigeria says the same: the “job in Dubai” usually arrives through a WhatsApp message, an Instagram account or a friend of a friend.

At the end, it is where women are mocked, and sometimes sold. The hashtag turns exploitation into entertainment and blames the women for it. Worse, a senior Nigerian anti-trafficking official told me that in some cases the acts were filmed without the women’s knowledge and sold as pornography. A woman who gets home and rebuilds her life may have the worst moments of it online, and no way to have them removed.

Between those two ends, the men who pay are almost invisible. The hashtag asks what kind of woman would do this. It never asks who is paying, or why. I will come back to that in a later piece on the demand side.

What the platforms should do

TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube and WhatsApp did not create trafficking. They do decide what millions of people see about it. They should:

• Treat porta potty content as possible evidence of trafficking and sexual violence, not as entertainment, and route it to trained reviewers rather than leaving it to trend.
• Stop amplifying content that names or shows real women, living or dead, as “porta potty” girls, and act quickly when families report it.
• Act on recruitment: accounts offering jobs in the Gulf with travel paid upfront, and offers of passports and identity documents, are the front door of this crime.
• Give survivors a route to have recordings of their exploitation found and taken down, across platforms, without having to view them first.
• Work with investigators in Nigeria, Uganda and the UAE when they ask for account data, so that the people behind the accounts can be found.

Governments in Nigeria and the UAE have their part too. I will set out what Nigeria, the UAE and the platforms must do in a later article in this series.

What you can do

• Do not share, stitch or comment on porta potty videos about real women. Report them to the platform as exploitation.
• If someone you know has been offered a job in Dubai, check it first: read the warning signs of a fake job offer.
• If a woman you know is in the UAE and wants to come home, our resources for Nigerian women trafficked to Dubai list organisations that can help, and how to contact us safely.
• Watch the BBC documentary on our videos page, and share that instead.

If you want to help a woman get home, our donate page explains how the money is used. To hear how this work started, listen to what I told the Agency for Change podcast about trafficking to the UAE.