The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan

[crystalgenie]

I watched this Frontline documentary on PBS and I just had to post this. I can't even describe how I felt other than mortification, sadness, and disgust. If you have not seen the documentary and have an hour to watch it, it is called "The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan".


PBS's Frontline has posted their latest piece online, and it is both fascinating and horrifying. "The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan" exposes the horrific practice called Bacha Bazi, in which young Afghan boys are sold to warlords and powerful businessmen to be trained as dancers who perform for male audiences in women's clothing and are then used and traded for sex. The practice is sadly making a comeback in that country.

Frontline writes:

Under the guise of doing a documentary on similar practices in Europe, Quraishi gained the confidence of Dastager, a former mujahideen commander and wealthy businessman whose business interests include importing autos from the Far East. With Dastager as his guide, Quraishi takes viewers inside the world of bacha bazi, where prominent men compete to own and use the boys.
"I go to every province to have happiness and pleasure with boys," says an Afghan man known as "The German," who acts as a bacha bazi pimp, supplying boys to the men. "Some boys are not good for dancing, and they will be used for other purposes. ... I mean for sodomy and other sexual activities."

links:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/22/dancing-boys-of-afghanist_n_548428.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/dancingboys/view/


I needed a shower after watching this documetary... I felt dirty and the sad thing is.. I still feel dirty.



To the mods: this is the first thread I've started and I wasn't sure of exactly where to put it so if it needs to be moved please move it.

 

[Elphaba]

I watched it, too... it was very disturbing to hear those men in the car talking about being in the desert with a young boy and how the men where taking turns having sex with him in a car. The whole documentary was disturbing, but one that needs a bigger light shown on it. At points I found myself angered, appalled and at times in tears.

 

[essies]

How appalling and sad!!:furious: Child abuse is everywhere and not enough is being done to stop it and protect the world's children!:banghead:

 

[Mr. E]

I watched it, too, and it was very disturbing. I cringed when it showed one boy dancing, and a man kept leaving the audience to touch and stand near the boy. It just turned my stomach. And the man who owned the boy at the beginning (name started with a "D") who had two little boys of his own -- and then had a separate home for all of his dancing boys. The man was so cool and calm...until his new boy disappeared and the man panicked, afraid the boy would accuse him of attempted rape. And didn't he say earlier that he did not sleep with the boys, just arranged for them to dance?

Creepy and disturbing, that's all I can say. So sad that families sold their boys. They had to have known that the boys would be abused.

 

[lizzybeth]

I saw the title of this thread and had a completely different idea of what it was about. Sometimes I stay away from threads that I think will be too disturbing or stay with me for a long time. This is one of those threads. I couldn't bring myself to watch the video or click the link.

It's an evil world we live in that preys on the innocent, weak, and the young.

 

[SurfieTX]

The 9-year-old boy with pale skin and big, piercing eyes captivated Mirzahan at first sight.

“He is more handsome than anyone in the village,” the 22-year-old farmer said, explaining why he is grooming the boy as a sexual partner and companion. There was another important factor that made Waheed easy to take on as a bacha bazi, or a boy for pleasure: “He doesn’t have a father, so there is no one to stop this.”

A growing number of Afghan children are being coerced into a life of sexual abuse. The practice of wealthy or prominent Afghans exploiting underage boys as sexual partners who are often dressed up as women to dance at gatherings is on the rise in post-Taliban Afghanistan, according to Afghan human rights researchers, Western officials and men who participate in the abuse.

“Like it or not, there was better rule of law under the Taliban,” said Dee Brillenburg Wurth, a child-protection expert at the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, who has sought to persuade the government to address the problem. “They saw it as a sin, and they stopped a lot of it.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...ible-victims/2012/04/04/gIQAyreSwS_story.html

 

[Danaya]

Sickening...

 

[~n/t~]

I don't see this as shocking. This is a form of child prostitution and sex slaving, imo.

Here are the US statistics on child prostitution. Some as young as 9 years old. Is it wrong? Absolutely.

Afghanistan is not the only country.

A study by Jessica Edwards, of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, found that an estimated 650,000 American teenagers exchange sex for favors. More surprising, more boys were likely to sell themselves than girls.

http://gvnet.com/childprostitution/USA.htm

The State of the World's Children (Unicef)

Although trafficking is a shadowy practice that has neither particular rules nor predictable sequences, some dominant regional patterns are identifiable:

In West and Central Africa the most common form of trafficking is an extension of a traditional practice - often a survival strategy - whereby children are 'placed' in marginal positions within other families. Increasingly this practice is being used to exploit children's labour, both within and outside the home. Children are also trafficked into plantations and mines, while in those countries affected by conflict they can be directly abducted by militias.

In East Asia and the Pacific most trafficking is into child prostitution, though some children are also recruited for industrial and agricultural work. It is largely driven by poverty and especially by the pull of the wealthier countries in the region. Girls are also recruited as mail-order brides and for domestic service.

In South Asia trafficking forms part of the immense child labour problem in the sub-continent, often related to debt bondage, whereby a child is in effect 'sold' to pay off a debt, frequently a debt deliberately imposed by the exploiter with this in mind. In addition to sex work, children are trafficked into carpet and garment factories, construction projects and begging.

In Europe children are mainly trafficked from east to west, reflecting the demand for cheap labour and child prostitution in the richer countries of the continent. Organized criminal gangs exploit the open borders to channel children into unskilled labour, work in the entertainment sector and prostitution.

In the Americas and the Caribbean much of the child trafficking is driven by tourism and focused on coastal resorts, again feeding a demand for child prostitution and easily exploitable labour. Criminal operations that used to move drugs across borders are reportedly now becoming involved in human trafficking as well.

Often children trafficked into one form of labour may be sold on into another, as with girls from rural Nepal who are recruited to work in carpet factories or hotels in the city but are then trafficked into the sex industry over the border in India. In almost all countries, the sex trade is the predominant form of exploitation of trafficked children, a practice that entails systematic, long-term physical and emotional abuse.


http://www.unicef.org/sowc06/profiles/trafficking.php

 

[~n/t~]

Every day, 2,000 children are forced into prostitution, a transnational enterprise that is growing in both size and scope. The International Labor Organization estimates that more than 2 million children under age 18 are involved in prostitution, half of them in Asia and 300,000 in the United States. Americans account for 80 percent of world arrests involving child sex tourism.

http://graphic.pepperdine.edu/perspectives/2003/2003-10-23-prostitution.htm

 

[gitana1]

I don't see this as shocking. This is a form of child prostitution and sex slaving, imo.

Here are the US statistics on child prostitution. Some as young as 9 years old. Is it wrong? Absolutely.

Afghanistan is not the only country.



http://gvnet.com/childprostitution/USA.htm

The State of the World's Children (Unicef)

Although trafficking is a shadowy practice that has neither particular rules nor predictable sequences, some dominant regional patterns are identifiable:

In West and Central Africa the most common form of trafficking is an extension of a traditional practice - often a survival strategy - whereby children are 'placed' in marginal positions within other families. Increasingly this practice is being used to exploit children's labour, both within and outside the home. Children are also trafficked into plantations and mines, while in those countries affected by conflict they can be directly abducted by militias.

In East Asia and the Pacific most trafficking is into child prostitution, though some children are also recruited for industrial and agricultural work. It is largely driven by poverty and especially by the pull of the wealthier countries in the region. Girls are also recruited as mail-order brides and for domestic service.

In South Asia trafficking forms part of the immense child labour problem in the sub-continent, often related to debt bondage, whereby a child is in effect 'sold' to pay off a debt, frequently a debt deliberately imposed by the exploiter with this in mind. In addition to sex work, children are trafficked into carpet and garment factories, construction projects and begging.

In Europe children are mainly trafficked from east to west, reflecting the demand for cheap labour and child prostitution in the richer countries of the continent. Organized criminal gangs exploit the open borders to channel children into unskilled labour, work in the entertainment sector and prostitution.

In the Americas and the Caribbean much of the child trafficking is driven by tourism and focused on coastal resorts, again feeding a demand for child prostitution and easily exploitable labour. Criminal operations that used to move drugs across borders are reportedly now becoming involved in human trafficking as well.

Often children trafficked into one form of labour may be sold on into another, as with girls from rural Nepal who are recruited to work in carpet factories or hotels in the city but are then trafficked into the sex industry over the border in India. In almost all countries, the sex trade is the predominant form of exploitation of trafficked children, a practice that entails systematic, long-term physical and emotional abuse.


http://www.unicef.org/sowc06/profiles/trafficking.php

Yes, it is happening around the world. But in certain countries, the apartheid of women creates an environment that allows this activity to occur more readily. In Afghanistan and other places where women are kept separate by men and faceless, without identity, the substitution of young boys for women, is common.

Boys and men are taught that women are bad, dirty, disgusting. Many turn to prepubescent boys as proxies for women.

In every society we have pedophiles, ephebophiles. In these societies, the apartheid of women increases the numbers.

 

[T4Tide]

I don't care how many times I hear it, it still shocks me...as it should. I hope I never live in a time or place that I am not shocked by such horrid actions.