A bad dream from which there's currently little hope of waking: the nightmare story of how Bangladesh's poorest of poor street children are kidnapped by pitiless slavers into all kinds of horrors.As reported in Scotland's Sunday Herald, the unfathomable laments from Dhaka's homeless women: "If We Fall Asleep The Gangs Steal Our Children":
Babu is four years old. [...] Three months ago he was kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken across the city by a man he had never seen before. Locked in a room for three days with little food or water, he was then sold for 4000 taka (about £35). [$55 CDN]
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Babu is one of thousands of permanent pavement dwellers in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and the world’s most densely populated city. Official figures put the population at 14 million: on top of that, however, it is estimated that there are between 20,000 and 50,000 men, women and children living on the streets. [...]
As Babu tries to rest, a crowd gathers and a piercing wail begins. A distraught woman emerges from the darkness, a baby clutched to her chest, pleading for help and tugging at the clothes of those around her. “My daughter has gone,” she cries. “I have lost my five-year-old girl. Who has taken her? Have you seen her?” The crowd surges but the woman runs back into the night. We cannot find her. The onlookers seem unaffected. They say children regularly go missing.
Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, estimates that 400 women and children fall victim to trafficking in Bangladesh each month. Most are between the ages of 12 and 16 and are forced to work in the sex industry. Some become domestic slaves, and the boys are often taken to the Middle East and forced to be camel jockeys.
The annual report of the Pakistan-based organisation Lawyers For Human Rights And Legal Aid revealed that 4500 Bangladeshi girls are sold in Pakistan in a single year.
The pavement dwellers claim children are sometimes also stolen by religious cults for rituals and sacrifices and a report by the international organisation Ecpat (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) says they are sold for their organs and body parts, a claim backed by Unicef’s research.
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Parents try to protect their children as well as they can. Mothers tie their toddlers to their bodies with their saris – little deterrent to the organised criminal gangs, known as mustans. One woman uses a padlock and chain.
Parents try to protect their children as well as they can. Mothers tie their toddlers to their bodies with their saris – little deterrent to the organised criminal gangs, known as mustans. One woman uses a padlock and chain.
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Babu has no-one to tie himself to. His mother died of rabies and his father of asthma. Dhaka is one of the world’s most polluted cities and deaths from respiratory disease are particularly common on the street. The smog runs the length and breadth of the city, every road clogged with rickshaws, buses and cars. It chokes out the sun and blurs the sunset as yellow fog turns to grey. The pollution, the lack of clean water and the problems people have accessing even rudimentary medical care mean that skin disease, bronchitis and tuberculosis are commonplace.
The only respite from the noise and filth is from 9am to 5pm, when Babu can access one of Concern Worldwide’s nine day-centres across the city. The centres support more than 1000 pavement dwellers each day, offering a place for them to rest, wash and cook. Children under five are given nursery education and lunch, allowing their parents to work.
The centres also run savings schemes and encourage young people into vocational training courses to offer them an escape from the streets. The project is called Amrao Manush, meaning “we are people too” in Bengali – a name devised by the pavement dwellers themselves. This year Concern hopes to raise enough money to open night shelters for the most vulnerable, including pregnant women and children. It is at night that the children are normally stolen.
Sufia Begum’s son Shakil was taken seven months ago. He has not been seen since. “He was only four years old,” she says, tightening her grip on her baby daughter. “It was night and he said he was going to the toilet. He never came back. I ran around screaming, looking for him. [...]
“They say my son has been sold abroad. This happens often. Some children are stolen for the sex trade and others for their body parts. I know that religious people steal children for sacrifices and rituals.” She begins to sob. “I still look, but do not know how to find him,” she says.
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Sufia gets about 100 taka (70p) a day from begging. Like the majority of the pavement dwellers, she has few possessions and no identity card, nor any chance of obtaining one without a birth certificate or address. Fewer than 10% of children in Bangladesh are registered at birth. This, coupled with high levels of police corruption, compounds the vulnerability of the pavement dwellers. Officials speak about them as if they are not citizens, not even human. [...]
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[M]any of the pavement women, most of whom leave home before they are 10 years old, attribute themselves the surname Begum, which means Queen. As with Sufia, Ratna claims the name as her own. Now 21, she still remembers the bus she took with her stepmother, the confusion and noise of the city compared to village life in Shirazgonj, 250km away, and the shock of being sold to a Dhaka brothel for about 3000 taka (£25) [$35 CDN]. She was just six years old.
“It was terrifying,” she says. “I cried and cried. Three men visited my room for sex at the same time. Two other girls and I plotted our escape. After three months we bribed the gatemen and we ran away. I have been living on the street since then.”
Ratna, whose name means “ornaments”, sleeps all day at one of the Concern centres in order to be vigilant on the streets at night. “I have to stay awake to ensure my nine-month-old son, Jannati, is safe,” she says. “Two years ago my other baby boy was stolen. He was eight months old. I went straight to the police but they said I should not be a mother, that I should not have brought a child into the world because I am a pavement dweller. They beat me.”
[A] few metres away, in the shelter of a disused toilet block, Shati Begum lays out some newspapers and plastic on the ground before unfurling a colourful sari upon which she will sleep. Aged 25, she is seven months pregnant. Five months ago, her seven-year-old son was taken in the night. “We were sleeping next to each other,” she says. “I was so tired because of the pregnancy. When I awoke, he was gone.
“I was crying and looking for him. I went to the police straight away with a photograph but they said they were not interested and wouldn’t even write it down. They said that as a pavement person I had no identity and that they did not care. They said I needed an address and an identity card.”
Shati still carries the photograph of her son but has given up hope of finding him.
