by photographer Shehzad Noorani
2000 FiftyCrows PhotoFund Winner

With more than half its population living below the poverty line, Bangladesh remains one of the poorest countries in the world.  Poverty, low social status and lack of opportunities for education and employment have forced many women into prostitution or exposed them to other forms of sexual exploitation.  The profession of prostitution in East Bengal is centuries old.  However, denying the realities and covering the facts is nothing new either.  The ‘civilized and pure’ society has always managed to deny the sex workers an existence. 

According to non-governmental organizations, over 150,000 women are involved in prostitution in Bangladesh while government statistics acknowledge only 9,000.  Despite being an integral part of the society, the existence of prostitution is repressed or simply denied.  The social status of sex workers in Bengali society is considered so low that they are not even allowed to wear shoes or sandals outside the brothel.  Even their death fails to end to their miseries.  Regardless of whether they are Hindu, Muslim or Christian, they are denied basic funeral rites.  When sex workers die in Daulatdia, a brothel near Padma river, their bodies are just thrown in the river.

Prior to 1995, Bangladesh NGO’s simply ignored the brothels and their workers. However, the threat of HIV/AIDS and large sums of money pumped into its prevention programs rapidly changed the situation. ‘Experts’ have been brought in and many studies on sex workers are being conducted.  On one hand, it means that the sex workers are being acknowledged; on the other hand, they are now recognized only as possible carriers of HIV and AIDS, thus further supporting the stigma against them as ‘untouchables.’ The classic pattern of social discrimination is beginning to show it’s ugly face and several brothels have already been attacked and demolished.  Sometimes these attacks are initiated by the righteous men of ‘pure’ society, sometimes by the religious groups and sometime by the government supported law enforcing-men.  Which ever the group may be, the motive is simple – clean up the ‘garbage’. 

Recently, in a move to implement a ‘rehabilitation’ plan, the government closed down two major brothels, making thousands of sex workers homeless over-night.  They picked up about two hundred women and forcefully took them to a vagrant house miles away from the cities.  In their haste to get quick results, the administration decided to torture the sex workers and to make “rehabilitation” easier, they were given food mixed with intoxicants. Hundreds of women managed to escape and took shelter in the streets.  While these poor women lay on the streets in a desperate state, trying to shelter their tiny infants from the pouring rain, the Prime Minister stated in a press conference,. “We have a constitutional obligation to discourage this profession,…We must eradicate this profession from the social life.” Unfortunately, the bureaucrats live in such privileged circumstances that they are irredeemably out of touch with the realities of the lives of millions of people living in immense desperation.

Brothels are essentially no different from a slum in an urban area or a village in a rural area.  Many tiny rooms on both sides of the street,  people sitting around and talking over glasses of local wine, children chasing each other in the midst of laughter.  They provide shelter to hundreds and thousands of women who have absolutely no where to go.  It is a place of desperation, violence and exploitation but, at the same time, it is a place where true feelings can be expressed without any apprehension. This dichotomy is what I attempt to express in my work in order to inform people about the plight of these women.