It's rather common in that part of the world. Older males tend to quite literally express dominance over younger males via servicing of lust. Effectively. It's a different world over there is all I will say.
Not really ordered to tolerate, but not really allowed to prosecute.
Affairs with other nations get weird. You're not there to impose your culture and customs on them. At the same time
… Our laws and governance are our culture and customs and we are supposed to be teaching them how to govern the way our culture does.
A friend of mine described a scenario where they got in a bunch of clothes donated by people. The military in those nations are often aligned with nobles and others of that variety - of a higher caste. The soldiers from 'host nation' would come up and yank clothes they wanted right out of the hands of the poor who were looking through them.
Technically, 'we' weren't supposed to interfere - but in his case, he couldn't take it, walked up, yanked the clothes back out of the hands of their privileged and handed them back to the poor families.
If we were going to be occupying their nation, then we needed to occupy their nation and compel changes to their culture and pattern of life. The idea we were going to change things by sitting around and solving their big problems while letting them continue on unfettered in nepotism is naive.
We created a rank for them: 'colonel private' - because military ranking structures were nepotistic to privilege family members, we couldn't shame their families by outwardly demoting people in rank… But they were basically a college fraternity handing out promotions to themselves and had to be treated like recruits.