She knows, she says, because she buys them. “They all lie.”įour floors down from Labonni’s bedroom, Farada, 33, says the number of trafficked girls has increased since she arrived at the brothel in 1999. “I don’t believe anything the men say to me any more,” she says later. I’m 70% sure that one day I will rescue her.” Labonni doesn’t look up. “You can’t sell a boy to a brothel, but you can sell a girl because she has monetary value.” He doesn’t feel guilty for paying for sex with a trafficked teenager. “All the girls here are helpless,” he says.
A married bus driver from the nearby town, he has been visiting Labonni every day for four and a half years, since she was 14. One of her regular customers, Mohammed Muktal Ali, is 30 years old. “My daughter doesn’t even know I’m her mum.” Even with her “debt” gone, she’s still obliged to pay half of her weekly earnings – approximately £78 – to the madams in exchange for electricity and a place to stay. Her mental strength is worn down by years of abuse. Last year she was finally told she had paid off her debt, but she has yet to move on. Labonni has now paid her original £914 “debt” back 50 times over. All she was given back was a £37 as a monthly allowance for food, clothes and toiletries. Until last year everything Labonni earned went to her madam. Yet over those six years she has earned upwards of £46,500 for madams who enjoy lives of considerable luxury. For the past six years, since being trapped in the brothel, she has worked continually to pay off her phantom debt. “They always find you,” she adds.Ī quick breakdown of the figures involved shows how girls like Labonni are a vital part of a hugely profitable business model for brothel owners in Bangladesh. She said that she’d hurt me if I tried to run away.” After two or three months, Labonni gave up trying to escape. Then she confiscated my phone and locked me in my bedroom. “She’d bribed the police to say I was 18 and told me I owed her more than £914. “The madam who bought me said that I had to pay her back,” Labonni says in a flat voice. Overnight, she became a chukri, or bonded sex worker – imprisoned within the brothel until she repaid hundreds of pounds in fabricated debts. Two days later, Labonni was sold by her to the brothel for about £180 and forbidden to leave.Ī graveyard for sex workers in Tangail. “I thought maybe I could find work in a garment factory.”Ī woman saw her looking tearful in Dhaka railway station, and offered her food and a place to sleep for the night. “I didn’t know where I was going,” she remembers.
On the run at 13 years old, she left her six-month-old daughter behind to flee the abusive husband she had been made to marry the year before, in a ceremony that took place on the same day she started her period. Like the majority of girls in Mymensingh, Labonni was trafficked into sex work. Ten minutes of sex will cost them TK400 (about £3.66) – but it’s money that mainly lands in the pockets of those running the brothel. Men swagger shirtless down the alleys looking for girls. Music blares from heavyset sound systems and homemade liquor is poured from plastic bottles to numb the pain. Girls as young as 12 sleep five to a room their beds only cordoned off by torn cotton curtains. Here, between 700 and 1,000 women and girls are working in the sex trade – many of them against their will.
Capitol a Day Before the Attack Amber Heard and Johnny Depp Wait for Virginia Jury to Decide Defamation Case Why This Man Confronted Ted Cruz At A Restaurant After His NRA Appearance Man Runs for His Life After Gunshots Fired at Gas Station in North Carolina What Does the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard Defamation Verdict Mean? Live Baby Woodpecker Gets Tangled in North Carolina Woman’s Hair Expert Chef Ashton Keefe Shows the Right Way to Eat Burgers, Pizza and Ice Cream Shipwrecked Gloucester That Sank in 1682 Found by Diving Brothers in 2007 Biden Makes His First Presidential Late-Night Show Appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Sriracha Shortage Looms as Company Stops Production Amid Poor Pepper Crops Britney Spears Gets Married to Sam Asghari in L.A.Now 19, Labonni says she’s resigned to life – and death – in Mymensingh, a brothel village in the centre of Bangladesh.
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