Sufia Begum is especially protective of her daughter – seven months ago her four-year-old son was abducted and has been missing ever since
by LUCY ADAMS
Smog shrouds the human shadows congregating beneath the wide arc of Bangladesh’s national football stadium.
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Car horns blast in the hazy darkness. It is 10pm. Babu is waiting to make his bed. He points to the bare concrete beneath the stadium’s outer terraces where distorted, headless-looking bodies lie curled in blankets. There are no walls, no doors.
They say my son has been sold abroad…some children are stolen for the sex trade and others for their body parts.
Sufia Begum
“This is where I sleep,” he says quietly in Bengali.
Next to Babu’s bed, a fetid dark liquid scattered with scraps of litter oozes from cracks in the road. To use the public toilets, they have to pay – so most of these children squat in the open.
First one floodlight goes out, then another. Only now is it safe for Babu to unfurl the dusty sheets that make his home. To lie down with the lights on makes a police beating almost inevitable. It is winter, and people are lying close together for warmth and because of the lack of space, bodies sprawled, limbs intertwining like a scene from a forensic snapshot of genocide. Nearby, one of Babu’s friends remains upright, on lookout duty for the first part of the night.
“Since I was kidnapped, my friends and I take it in turns to stay awake and keep watch,” he says. “We have a rota. We can’t all sleep at once in case the police come early or the gangs try to steal someone.”
Babu is four years old. He sleeps here every night and wakes with the 5.30am call to prayer of the nearby mosque. 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).
“He was selling me to another person when I started screaming and crying and a policeman came and caught him,” he says. “I was so very afraid. The policeman beat the man and then asked me where I stayed.”
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. Most are environmental refugees who have fled flooding in outlying parts of the country. When they arrive, they find themselves prey to other dangers.
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.
The Poppy Project, a London-based charity that supports the female victims of trafficking in the UK, has to date helped 11 Bangladeshi women. Trafficked children have also been identified in Britain.
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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