Porta potty parties: what survivors told us about exploitation in the UAE

Online, “porta potty party” is treated as gossip: a hashtag, a punchline, a story about rich men in Dubai and women who chose to be paid. The Nigerian women I interviewed about their time in the United Arab Emirates describe something else. They were forced into it, beaten when they refused, and years later many of them still cannot talk about it.

This article describes sexual violence. It contains no graphic detail.

Between November 2025 and March 2026 I interviewed 24 Nigerian women who had been trafficked to the UAE for sexual exploitation. The interviews are part of a research 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 interview was given with informed consent, and every woman is anonymous. The first findings were published by the Hope Education Project as Porta Potty Nigeria: Survivor Testimony from the UAE. This piece sets out what the women told us and what Stop Trafficking Africa thinks should follow.

What “porta potty” means

“Porta potty” is slang for a portable toilet. Since around 2019 the term, often as “Dubai porta potty” or “porta potty party”, has spread on TikTok and X to describe men, mostly in the Gulf, paying or forcing women into sexual acts involving human excrement. The name says how those men treat the women: as something to be used and thrown away.

When the women in our study had words for it at all, they used a Nigerian Pidgin term.

The word “party” does the most damage. It suggests a good time and a choice. Neither fits anything we heard.

What the women told us

Not every woman in the study had been through this, and some would not or could not say. Among those who confirmed it, the accounts matched in their detail, although the interviews were separate and held over five months with women who had no contact with each other.

It was forced

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

The control behind this is the same control we saw when we brought women home from Dubai and Sharjah from 2020 onwards: passports taken and sold, a “debt” for visa and travel that never shrinks, beatings, and the threat of arrest or deportation if a woman goes to the police. A woman in that position does not negotiate. One survivor told me she had “no choice but to be strong”.

The men who demanded it

The women who confirmed the practice described the men who demanded it as Arab. That is what they reported, not an established fact. They had thought the men were Arab, from how they dressed, spoke and behaved, but a woman held by traffickers often has no way of knowing a man’s nationality, and 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.

So the testimony does not tell us who these men were. It does tell us that men with money in the UAE are paying for this, and demand is where the harm starts. I will write about the men and the market in a later piece.

Some of it was filmed

The same official told me that in some cases the acts were filmed, without the women’s knowledge, and the recordings sold as pornography. A woman who has come home and rebuilt her life may have the worst moments of it circulating online. She cannot see those recordings, cannot have them removed and may not know they exist. Neither Nigeria nor the UAE has a legal response designed for this.

The harm that lasts

Women who had survived passport confiscation, debt bondage and repeated rape told us this did the deepest and longest-lasting damage. When I said it must have been deeply distressing, one woman answered with one word, “indescribable”, and said nothing more. Another still has nightmares years after coming home; the worst part, she said, was that there was no warning and no way to prepare. Another needed surgery in Nigeria for injuries she could not afford to treat.

Several women could not discuss it at all. That silence is itself a finding: these are women who can describe beatings and rape in detail.

What this research is, and what it is not

This is qualitative research: 24 interviews, not a survey of every Nigerian woman in the UAE. It cannot tell you how common the practice is. It shows a consistent account from women interviewed separately, supported by an official who handles these cases. A full paper is in preparation. The academic gap is real; the Hope Education Project has set out how little has been written in Coprophilic Exploitation in Trafficking: A Critical Gap in the Academic Literature.

What needs to change

• Media and social platforms should treat porta potty content as evidence of trafficking and sexual violence, not entertainment. BBC Africa Eye’s #DubaiPortaPotty investigation, which you can watch on our videos page, shows how a viral hashtag turned a young woman’s death into a joke.
• Interventions that focus only on women’s vulnerability will not stop men paying for this. Researchers and governments need to examine who is buying, and why.
• Nigeria and the UAE should make it possible for a woman to have recordings of her exploitation taken down and to pursue the people who made and sold them.
• Counselling and reintegration support for women coming home from the UAE needs to account for this specific trauma.

Researchers, lawyers and practitioners who work on any of this 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.

If you or someone you know is in the UAE

Our resources for Nigerian women trafficked to Dubai list organisations in the UAE and in Nigeria, and how to contact us safely. We can sometimes help with the cost of getting home: see funds for repatriation to Nigeria. For the wider picture of what lies behind searches like this one, read Sex in Dubai: what’s the real story?