WUNRN
LINK INCLUDES VIDEO.
Joanna Moorhead
The
Guardian - 5 April 2010
BANGLADESH - SEX WORKERS GIVEN
STEROIDS TO MAKE UNDERAGE
GIRLS LOOK OLDER AND
FLESHIER - LONG-TERM HEALTH RISKS
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
================================================================
To contact the list administrator, or to leave the list, send an email to:
wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com. Thank you.