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
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.
The sound, the sight and even the smell of sex is everywhere in the brothel. A young couple duck into a room, closing the door tightly behind them; an older man emerges from another door further along the corridor, his face beaded with sweat. In the corners there are mounds of used condoms.
And it is on one of these corridors that I meet the girls who remind me so much of my own girls. I try to start a conversation, but we don’t speak the same language. And then I see another, even more shocking, sight: a third girl who appears no older than my third daughter who’s not even 12. The photographer arrives, and he speaks Bangla. “Ask her how old she is,” I say. The photographer, hearing her answer, shakes his head. “She says 22.” And then we all laugh, because it seems the only thing to do. I look again at the girl, and I notice her budding breasts and her impish smile, both so like my daughter’s.
That girls this young are condemned to a life of sexual slavery anywhere in 2010 is bad enough; that it has to be in an overcrowded hellhole such as this, with a stench so bad it is hard not to gag, is unbelievable. These days there is also a new horror, one that could snuff out the chance of a future for these girls. The horror is a drug called Oradexon; a drug identical to one used to fatten cattle. A drug that is now being used routinely in brothels throughout Bangladesh, by madams desperate to make the girls in their employ seem older and more attractive to clients. It has the added bonus of making them less likely to attract the attention of the police sex workers here must be 18 or over, though the Faridpur brothel is clearly full of girls who are not.
No one is quite sure how long Oradexon has been a feature of life in the brothels, but it has been a while; long enough for the sardarni, or brothel caretakers, to have found out that there can be long-term health implications, and to have chosen to ignore them.
According to the charity ActionAid, which has just published a report into the use of Oradexon among Bangladeshi sex workers, the drug is most commonly taken by girls and women aged between 15 and 35. “It’s cheap and it’s easily available,” says Luftun Nahar, who works in the organisation’s Dhaka office, and helped compile the report.
Nahar was one of the first people to realise that the drug was being widely used. “I remember thinking, there are all these bulky girls here how did they get like that?” she says. “And then I asked around and someone told me they were all taking a drug called Oradexon, which is the same preparation used for cows on farms, to make them fatter.”
The drug, says Nahar, is a godsend to the madams and brothel-owners. It means the pimps are able to get girls who are as young as 12 or 13 many of them have been trafficked, and have nowhere else to go and make them look much older.
“The pimps supply the drug, which is very cheaply available. And then they are even more powerful in the girls’ lives, because the girls are hostages–they need to go on taking the drug, because if they come off it they get all these side-effects: bad headaches, stomach pains, no appetite, skin rashes. With those effects, of course, they can’t work–and they can’t stop working or they’ll have no food, and nowhere to live.”
ActionAid’s campaign against the drug is directed at users, because stopping the supply chain would simply be too difficult. The campaign to educate the girls about the importance of condoms to stop HIV infection is held up as a model that worked, on the whole. But no one thinks this will be an easy battle, because for the madams there are clear advantages in having workers on Oradexon dissuading them from getting their girls to use the drug will be tough.
Dr Bashirul Islam, head of healthcare services in Faridpur, is working with ActionAid. He says Oradexon can be extremely dangerous for healthy young women. “It’s a life-saving drug for very serious problems [the drug is also a steroid hormone, used to treat inflammatory disorders]. Taken by these girls, it impairs the kidneys, increases the blood pressure and interferes with normal hormone production. It also causes widespread oedema, or swelling, throughout the body. There are also severe problems with coming off the drug, because it’s highly addictive. So if the girls stop taking it, they need a lot of help they get bad stomach aches, they are sick, they get headaches.”
As to where it comes from, Oradexon is easily available from the quacks, or unqualified pharmacists who operate widely throughout Bangladesh, says Islam. “There should be better regulation to stop them selling the drug, but there is not,” he says.
Asha works in Faridpur brothel as a sex worker. She is 19 years old. Photograph: GMB Akash/Panos/ActionAid
Asha, 19, is one of the many girls who use the drug. She says she doesn’t have another name “I’m just Asha it means ‘hope'” and she has been in the brothel for two years. She is keen to tell me that she came here alone, that she wasn’t coerced into this life but I’ve already been warned that all the girls here will tell that same story, because they’ve been told by their madams not to say anything to blame their families or their employers.
Many of the girls here have been sold by a stepmother or even their own mothers and some are second-generation sex workers, born to a prostitute and an unknown client. “I started taking the cow drug a year ago, and I take two tablets a day,” she says. Like the other girls, she is given Oradexon by her madam some of the girls say they have tried refusing, but have been told they must take it, to make them look “fairer”. Asha thinks it makes her look healthier. “The customers like us to look healthy. I got a little plumper when I started taking the drug.” The existence she describes is a miserable one. “How can I be happy here? God knows there is no happiness here,” she says. “Because I have been here for a long time I am allowed to go out a bit, but some of the girls don’t go out at all.”
Unsurprisingly and despite her name Asha isn’t very hopeful for her own future. “I don’t think I’ll ever get married or have children,” she says. “No one will marry me. If they did they’d only keep me for two or three days, and then they’d sell me back.” She is more streetwise than some of the other girls here, many of whom share a tragic dream that one day a knight in shining armour will arrive, to carry them off; then they will marry him, have his babies and love him for ever. (Some of the girls here have thought they had found their knight; the many babies, conceived by girls who allowed men they thought would marry them in order to have condom-free sex, bear witness to that.)
But though she’s realistic about her future, Asha has that irrepressible optimism of the very young and because she has only been on the drug for a year, her body doesn’t yet look too swollen by it. Juaina Begum is very different. She has been taking Oradexon for five years, and though she says she was thin once, she is heavy and swollen now. “I got fat quickly,” she says, pulling back her scarf to reveal shoulders heavy with oedema. Her midriff and legs are swollen too she moves around slowly and deliberately.
Like so many of the poorest people in Bangladesh, she’s unsure of her actual age but she looks in her early to mid-30s. In brothel terms, that’s over the hill and Juaina knows it. “I have two or three customers a day,” she says. “But it always depends on how beautiful they think you are.” She worries, she says, about what will happen when she loses what she describes as her “fairness”. “I don’t know how I’ll survive then,” she says.
Juaina thinks Oradexon keeps her looking good, which is why she’s going to go on taking it. “If you work in this brothel, you have to take this medicine. Everyone does. If you take the medicine you will look healthy and otherwise you will look ugly. Also, my body is used to the medicine now. If I take it, I’m OK. If I don’t take it, I feel bad and then I can’t work. So stopping it isn’t possible.”
Juaina says she has been a sex worker for many years she’s not sure exactly how many. For a while, she says, her fortunes changed she fell in love and left the brothel to live with a man. “When I came back here I didn’t want to take the medicine, but my madam pushed me. She said I had to.
“But now my life is such that I take the drug willingly. I’ve stopped dreaming of another kind of life. What I really want to do is die I pray for God to take me. I’d have liked to have had my own family, my own children. No one in the world loves me I don’t even have any friends here.”
Juaina’s big, sad eyes have been brimming with tears, and now they begin to fall: she wipes her face with her bright yellow scarf. Then she takes me to look around the space she calls home: a tiny room on the corner of a fly-infested alley, on the outskirts of the brothel building itself.
The room has no windows: when she closes the door, apart from a candle, it is totally dark. There is hardly room to stand up: just a rickety table, a bed, a few piles of clothes stuffed on to a shelf and a couple of pots and pans, which she takes outside when she wants to cook some rice. It is no life at all, and Juaina a woman who carries herself with dignity, and who talks with the honesty of one who has no need to lie knows it.
The tragedy is that today’s Ashas are tomorrow’s Juainas, and there are thousands upon thousands of women, both old and young, at brothels across Bangladesh. On the outskirts of Faridpur, on the River Padma, is a smaller brothel of around 175 women. After the dinginess of the town brothel, the sunny huts of this operation seem a much more pleasant working environment for the teenage girls but the toll, in human terms, is every bit as desperate. I spend my last morning in Bangladesh here, much of it with Payel, who is 15 and has been taking Oradexon for several months.
Payel says she’s never been to school; she is a second-generation sex worker, the daughter of a prostitute. She has been working since the age of 12, and she arrived yesterday from another brothel. “I think I’m going to like it here,” she says. “The air is fresher than in town.” Yesterday was market day, she says, and she had 10 customers. She wants to know more about my teenage daughters. What do they look like? What’s it like growing up in London?
When it’s time to go, she walks with me to the car, holding my hand to guide me across the cobbles. I’m touched by how gentle and sweet-natured she is; but when we get to the car, and I turn to say goodbye, she is nowhere to be seen. “Are you looking for Payel?” asks the interpreter. “She had to go.”
I look up the path, and I see the back of this lovely young girl and a man walking beside her, who is almost certainly a truck driver from the ferry that has just docked. As I watch her, Payel turns, smiles and shrugs her shoulders in a gesture that seems to say, “This is how it is for me.” And then she turns back to her client, and they head together towards the brothel.
For further information on this article please see http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/05/sex-workers-bangladesh-steroid
This article was kindly forwarded by WUNRN http://www.wunrn.com
