Rabat — Morocco closed 2025 with the strongest tourism figures in its history. The kingdom welcomed a record 19.8 million tourists in 2025, a 14 percent rise from 2024, according to the Ministry of Tourism, Handicrafts and Social and Solidarity Economy, and tourism receipts reached 124 billion dirhams, roughly $13.5 billion, in the first eleven months of the year, keeping Morocco ahead of Egypt as Africa’s top destination. But alongside the official celebration, the boom has revived an uncomfortable and long-running national debate: what to do about the sex trade that shadows the tourism economy, and whether legalization would tame it or entrench it.
An illegal industry hiding in plain sight
On paper, the question should not exist. Prostitution has been illegal in Morocco since the 1970s, punishable by up to a year in prison, and in 2003 the government explicitly added sex tourism to the penal code as a criminal offense. In practice, the trade is substantial and widely acknowledged. In 2015, the Moroccan Health Ministry estimated around 50,000 women were involved in prostitution, concentrated heavily around Marrakesh, while UN estimates put the figure closer to 75,000. More than 60 percent of the activity is concentrated in major cities such as Marrakech and Casablanca, the same cities driving the tourism surge.
The economic entanglement is the heart of the problem. Sex tourists are understood to be a meaningful driver of demand in one of Morocco’s main economic sectors, which is a key reason authorities are seen as ambivalent — enforcing the law inconsistently while discouraging public discussion of the issue. With tourism accounting for 12.3 percent of GDP in 2024, and the country targeting 26 million tourists by 2030 ahead of co-hosting the FIFA World Cup, the incentive to avoid anything that might dent arrivals is only growing.
The economic case for legalization
Proponents of decriminalization or regulation frame their argument in largely economic and public-health terms. By taxing and zoning the activity, they argue, the state could generate revenue and impose oversight on a sex-tourism market that currently exploits poverty while yielding nothing to public coffers. The status quo, in this view, produces the worst of both worlds: a large informal market with no labor protections, no tax base, and no health regulation. Advocates also point to an estimated 5 percent HIV prevalence among sex workers in areas like Agadir, arguing that regulation would improve access to testing and treatment currently hindered by fear of arrest.
Enforcement patterns strengthen the reformers’ case that criminalization is failing on its own terms. Roughly 70 percent of arrests target the women themselves — the most visible and vulnerable participants — while clients and pimps largely escape consequences, a dynamic worsened by police corruption.
The economic case against
Opponents, who dominate public discourse in a country where Islamic norms shape law, counter with economic arguments of their own. They contend that legitimizing prostitution in a context of widespread poverty and weak institutions would incentivize exploitation, since the state lacks the capacity to reliably distinguish voluntary work from coercion, and they cite evidence from regulated markets elsewhere suggesting legalization can fuel organized crime and trafficking — risks amplified by Morocco’s porous borders. In this framing, legalization would not formalize an existing market so much as expand it, deepening the country’s dependence on a form of tourism revenue built on desperation. Critics argue the real answer is poverty alleviation, and that the state’s current tacit tolerance is itself a symptom of unemployment rather than policy.
The costs the numbers don’t capture
Whatever the fiscal arithmetic, researchers stress that the trade imposes severe human costs that fall hardest on the young. Morocco’s accessibility from Europe, its large population of impoverished children, and weak enforcement of child-protection law have made it a destination for child sex tourism, with abused minors often treated by the system as offenders rather than victims. There are no official figures on child prostitution, and no government study has been conducted on the subject, a data vacuum that advocacy groups say makes the problem harder to fight. Reports have long identified poverty and social exclusion, family breakdown, and gaps in legislation and education as root causes of the phenomenon.
The government has not been entirely passive. A Committee of Responsible Tourism was created in 2007, guides warning that sex tourism is illegal are distributed at embassies and airports, and a 2011 law addressed support for victims of sexual violence. The U.S. State Department’s Tier 2 trafficking classification reflects a government making significant efforts but falling short, with legal gaps that allow pimps and network organizers to keep operating.
For now, formal legalization remains politically remote. The likelier trajectory is continued official denial paired with selective enforcement — a policy equilibrium that, economists on both sides of the debate agree, allows the state to collect tourism’s foreign exchange while outsourcing its costs to the people at the bottom of the trade.
