Posted by The prostitutes in Bangladeshi brothels are often underage and unpaid – and now, many of them are hooked on steroids that are damaging to their health.
Child prostitution in Bangladesh
I’m walking along a brightly painted corridor when a couple of young girls catch first my eye, and then my arm. They smile at me, and giggle; they look about the same ages as my elder daughters, 17 and 15. Just like my daughters, these girls have taken a lot of time over their makeup and their clothes: and they look beautiful. In their faces I see the same fun and youthful optimism that I see every day in my own house.
But there the comparisons end. Because I am in Faridpur in central Bangladesh, on the banks of the Padma river; and these girls are sex workers.
Each day they must have intercourse with four or five different men, for the price of around 100 taka, or £1, a time. And for most of the girls here, there is no monetary gain whatsoever: because most of the inmates (and it is, in many ways, like a prison) at Faridpur brothel are chhukri, or bonded sex workers, sold by their families to a madam in return for two or three years in which she, the brothel-owner, can pocket all their earnings.
It is a terrible, filthy, overcrowded place, this Faridpur brothel. To reach it you walk through a series of dusty, narrow alleys, uneven underfoot; past endless booths selling dusty bottles of soft drinks and past-their-sell-by-date packets of crisps; past skinny goats and even skinnier, rag-clad people. There is a ripple of excitement as you pass, because westerners are unusual in Faridpur.
And then, ducking under a couple of greying rags that serve as makeshift curtains, you turn into a new alley; and then to a doorway with several men hanging around, and two or three cigarette-sellers at the entrance (they sell cigarettes singly here; the men like a post-coital smoke).
The brothel is huge: 800 girls live in the fortress-like building, with its dark and narrow, but gaudily painted, corridors. There are many doors, and behind each one is a tiny room with a barred window, and just enough space for a rag-strewn double bed where the girls take their customers. The girls sleep two to a room; when one arrives with a client, the other simply makes herself scarce. Many of the customers are migrant workers, who are employed in the numerous brick-making factories in the area; other clients are truck drivers, since Faridpur is on an important trading route, and the ferries bringing lorries from Dhaka dock nearby. What is strange is that using prostitutes seems to be tolerated in this Muslim country: when I ask our Bangladeshi interpreter about this, he points out that the brothels were established under British rule, during the 18th and 19th centuries. …
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by Joanna Moorhead
Source: guardian.co.uk
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