Porta potty parties: the men who pay and why they do it

Porta potty exploitation exists because men pay for it. Every viral video asks what kind of woman would do this. Almost nobody asks who the men are or why they do it. The honest answer is that nobody has studied them. What we do know, from the women who were forced to serve them, is that these are men with money in the UAE, that traffickers organise the supply for them, and that the woman’s lack of choice appears to be part of what they are paying for.

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

Why the men are missing from the story

Most writing on trafficking is about supply: poverty, fake job offers, debt, juju, the networks that move women from Nigeria to the Gulf. That matters, and I have written about it in fake job offers in Dubai: the warning signs. But a trafficker only moves a woman to Dubai because someone there will pay for her. Take away the buyer and the business model collapses.

Porta potty is the clearest case. The term is slang for a portable toilet, and it describes how the men treat the women: as something to be used and thrown away. 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 that made it famous, as I set out in #DubaiPortaPotty: what the hashtag hides, puts the women on trial and leaves the men out of the frame entirely.

What survivors told us about the men

Between November 2025 and March 2026 I interviewed 24 Nigerian women who had been trafficked to the UAE for sexual exploitation. The research is a partnership led by the Hope Education Project. I am the principal investigator; my co-investigators are Dr Maryam Rafieifar of the University of Texas at Arlington and Dr Mitra Naseh of the Forced Migration Initiative at the Brown School, Washington University in St. Louis. Every woman gave informed consent and every woman is anonymous. The first findings were published as Porta Potty Nigeria: Survivor Testimony from the UAE.

None of the women was asked to study the men. They were asked what happened to them. What they said about the men still adds up to a picture.

Who the men were

The women who confirmed this practice described the men who demanded it as Arab. That is what they reported, not an established fact. They judged it from how the men dressed, spoke and behaved, and a woman held by traffickers usually has no way of knowing a man’s nationality. We have not been able to verify it. A senior Nigerian anti-trafficking official with direct experience of UAE cases told me, separately, that victims who reported to him described the men the same way, and he also pointed out that some women could not reliably tell one nationality from another.

So nationality is the weakest part of the evidence, and I will not build an argument on it. Paying for a trafficked woman is not one nationality’s crime. Jennifer, whom we brought home from Sharjah in 2020, was held in a club mainly used by African clients. A Nigerian woman the Hope Education Project interviewed in Accra in 2025, about the same practice in Ghana, said of the clients: “Everybody - any nationality”.

What the women’s accounts do establish is simpler. These were men with money, in the UAE, who knew exactly what they were asking for.

Force is part of what they buy

No woman who described this practice called it a choice. Several refused the first time and were beaten, threatened, or in one case stripped and left outside in the compound yard. For one woman it was her first assignment in the UAE. Several were given cocaine or other drugs before they were taken to the men.

Based on what the women told me, the absence of choice is not a side effect of this practice. It appears to be part of its appeal.

A supply chain built around them

Traffickers do not drug a woman for their own benefit. They do it so she can be delivered to a client who will pay. The same official told me that in some cases the acts were filmed without the women’s knowledge, under an arrangement between the clients and the traffickers, and sold as pornography. BBC Africa Eye filmed the man it identified as running a Ugandan network in Dubai offering women to clients for degrading acts; he told the BBC the allegations were false.

Demand shapes what the traffickers sell. When men will pay for acts that women refuse, the network’s answer is force.

Why do men do it?

People search for exactly this question, and the truthful answer is that the research does not exist. Nobody has interviewed the men who pay for this in the UAE. The Hope Education Project has set out how thin the academic literature is in Coprophilic Exploitation in Trafficking: A Critical Gap in the Academic Literature.

What we can do is name the likely drivers and say they need testing. In its 2025 piece on the practice in Ghana, Porta Potty Culture in Ghana, the Hope Education Project put forward four:

Loneliness and sexual deprivation in men who cannot form healthy relationships.
Expectations shaped by pornography, as men are exposed to more and more extreme content.
Untreated mental health problems, including compulsion and trauma.
Power and control: for some men the point is less the sex than humiliating someone more vulnerable than themselves.

Our casework adds two things. The first is entitlement bought with money. Jennifer’s clients paid around $60, a lot compared with what sex cost at home, and in her words, “they treated me like an animal”. Paying that much made clients feel they were owed something. The second is impunity. These men face little risk that we can see. The women cannot go to the police without fearing arrest themselves, and nothing in public discussion of porta potty ever points at the buyer.

The power-and-control explanation fits what the women told us most closely. A practice whose appeal depends on the woman having no choice is about domination, not desire.

The men who look away

Not every man who buys sex from a trafficked woman in the UAE demands this. The others still matter. Between them, the 24 women in our study had, conservatively, 30,000 encounters with men. Five of those men asked if they were okay. Each time one did, the woman got out.

The silence runs wider than the clients. Some hotels in Dubai do not just ignore the trade under their roofs but profit from it, as I wrote in corporate social responsibility and hotels in the UAE. Forums where men swap tips on where to buy sex in Dubai are a search away. A market this open is not hidden. It is tolerated.

What has to change on the demand side

Study the buyers. Interventions aimed only at women’s vulnerability will not stop men paying for this. The Hope Education Project is calling for research partnerships that include men’s mental and sexual health specialists, so the demand side is examined with the same seriousness as the supply side.
Treat the buyer as part of the crime. A man who pays for a trafficked woman is not a bystander. Law and enforcement in the UAE should put the risk on him, not on the woman he paid for. I will set out what Nigeria, the UAE and the platforms must do in a later article in this series.
Stop the filming and the selling. Clients and traffickers who record women without their knowledge should be prosecuted, and survivors need a way to have those recordings found and removed.
Hold hotels and platforms to account for the business they host and the content they amplify.
Ask. If you are a man in Dubai, or anywhere, and a woman in front of you looks frightened, drugged or controlled, ask her if she needs help. Five men did, and five women went home.

If you or someone you know needs help

If a woman you know is in the UAE and wants to come home, read trafficked to Dubai or the UAE? How to get help getting home and our resources for Nigerian women trafficked to Dubai, which list organisations in the UAE and Nigeria and how to contact us safely. Researchers and practitioners working on the demand side can reach us through our contact page. If you want to help a woman get home, our donate page explains how the money is used.