Misleading Dreams....

Thousands of people migrate to Dhaka veryday with their famlies with the much cherished hope of a better life.The city is far from being the place of endless opportunities and dreams as newcomers from the villages might think. Crime squalor, hunger an poverty are the more likely companions for the thousands who who have to make the city streets their home. Many of them are children. The life sequence of these children are unimaginable to all except for all those who live it. Being born near garbages, scavenging is their childhood pastime. Rickshawpulling as male adolescents and prostitution as females, they often end up as old beggars tapping on car windows.

These young dwellers of the street are often referred to as 'floating children'. 'Floating' because, they have nowhere to go and nobody to belong to. They are often lost souls from villages, broken families and street/city slums. Many of thses children are born illegetimate and spend their childhood roaming around the streets. The streets of Dhaka serve as the cross-roads of rickshawpullers, child prostitutes, muggers, slum-dwellers and way-side shop and restaurant owners.. Children from such diverse and poor backgrounds intermingle and turn to each other for comfort, bulding an environment to which they are best-suited.

In such precarious conditions, the fate of a girl-child becomes inevitable.The only way she can thrive is by giving up her dreams and are left in a world of lecherous men whose depraved minds make them easy prey.

A Playful, Carefree Childhood.....

Bangladeshi child prostitutes start their life as a nameless "Tokai". "Tokai" is a Bengali word literally meaning someone who scavenges, collects scraps of metal, broken glasses, empty tin cans and papers from the garbage disposals in the cities.As they tirelessly continue their scavenging and wander about, crows, stray dogs and their flying kites are their only companions. Many of these tokais were born of sex-workers. They never knew a father and are independent of their mothers.They usually find themselves a so-called 'uncle', 'aunt' or 'brother' who try to sustain them by managing a job and whom they turn to in times of need and advice.

Family Unhappiness....

Many come from wayside broken families. They take to the streets to turn away from family frustrations and in search of a carefree but haphazard lifestyle.Marzina, a teenager, lives with her six siblings on the sidewalk. Her mother is a domestic helper. Her father left the family to marry another woman. Marzina, still in her teens, has offered herself for sale on the streets. She makes it her playground, livelihood and her destiny. Shahana, on the other hand, stays with her older sister who is a street sex worker in the Hiogh Court Mazar area in Dhaka. She is preparing to join a garment factory to earn a more respectable living.

Family trouble is bound to cause unhappiness in a child's life and most of these young girls are daring enough to run away in search of only a more haunting life. Lipi, a girl in her early teens, ran away from home to escape an abusive stepmother. She took shelter in the Kamalapur railway station, Dhaka. Like many runaway children, Lipi sells her body for food. She has a friend, Shathi, another adolescent street prostitute, who has left her home in Rangpur in Northern Bangladesh.

Sexual Molestations

The fate of any girl child who has made the street her home may seem inevitable, but none wants to willingly submit herself to it. She does not have the luxury of choosing a path in life. Adolescent street girls most commonly sell drinking water, chocolates, chips and flowers on the wayside or to the visitors of the city parks. Although a self-respectful alternative of sustaining themselves, it cannot offer any security.With the pretext of buying water, some lecherous men try to touch the young girls and use obscene language. The girls accept all kinds of harassment in silent tolerance because they have no other choice. They have to help contribute to their family's earnings. Others like Shahana prepare to join garment factories. Sonia 13, lives with a so-called 'aunt' in a city slum. Her aunt earns her living as a sex worker.Living with a sex worker exposes and makes her vulnerable to the life of one from a very early stage.

Floating adolescent girls spend nights in the open with male companions of different ages. Some voluntarily offer themselves to men for company, comfort and security. With no power to rebuff, others are forced. Young street girls in Bangladesh sell their bodies for food, company , comfort and for recreation like movie-going. One can also to some extent believe that children have an urge to explore. But, when a girl, irrelevan of her social status owns up to herself as a sx worker, it is always a gradual process. Homeless street girls are sexually abused even before puberty begins. They are conditioned by the ways of a street life which leaves them with no other option. They come to accept sexual assault as a form of livelihood, no matter how distressing and low. Rarely, a girl is willing to offer her body for sale. She would have to be raped first, often at her own poverty-stricken, unprotected home, at times in the house she is working as domestic aid and definitely in the streets. There have many cases where the young girls have run away from the house they were working at to escape from sexual abuse only to end up homeless and unprotected in the streets.

A Life of Pretensions, A Quest for Love and Respect

In the congested city of Dhaka , public places like the Kamalapur Rail Station, the biggest in the country, pavements and parks are dwellings of chid prostitutes. Parks are the favorite hang-out places for the street children. Young girls get together with their adolescent rickshawpuller friends for fun, noise and games. Their only form of enetertainment is the cinema where they can escape the reality. Street children can identify themselves with the cinema very easily. Fights, obscene language and sexual acts are part of the movies as much as they are of their lives. They only know a crude way of living and even the games they play portray nothing apart. They often make up and indulge in games like fighting over a girl or enacting scenes from a movie. Shahid, for instance, is a small boy of twelve who ran away from his home in the district of Bogra to escape from the clutches of an abusive stepmother. He is a newcomer in the cty and loves enacting fight scenes from movies. His life, like many others, depict the exactness of Bengali movies where the presence of an unkind stepmother is very predictable. while the boys dream of becoming their idolized movie heroes, young street girls are fascinated by the colorful world of fashion and romance as evoked by the heroines. Fifteen-year old Sonia wants to get a new hairstyle with the help of her pimp. Babita, on the other hand, is addicted to marijuana and sleeping pills. She has taken up prostitution to afford the drugs. But Babita is not her real name. Street girls often change their names to those of their favorite actress.

Street girls go through a phase in their lives when they fall in love. In the streets, rituals are outdated. A girl marries a man verbally without any legal documents--"Tui amar bou, ami tor jamai" ( You are my wife, I am your husband) is enough. The men however atre not loyal for long. Just when the girl begins to get a sense of security and fulfilment, the so-called husband leaves her behind to sell her body once again, while he himself marries a 'chaste' woman. All that is left is a new baby to be conditioned by the ways of the street.

Point of No Return

Perhaps the most unfortunate fact is that very few of these young girls can get a new lease of life. They are frustratingly reluctant even if there are opportunities to start afresh. n Bangladesh, there are some dynaic NGOs like Aparajeyo Bangla, Panthakoly and Naripokkho which are rigorously working for street children and young women as victims of violence. These NGOs do not always explicitly reveal taht they work for the rehabilitation of child prostitutes, but they house quite a number of young girls from the profession.

Street girls choose a sheltered home for a few days. Sometimes they are picked up by police vans which transport them to the shelter centres. In most cases, they get bored and start missing the freedom of the streets. It is not difficult to escape from these centres either. even if thre are adequate provisions for adequate food, clothing and education, the shelter homes offer a life too disciplined to be alluring. Once a young street girl commented---" I may have less to eat but I like this life the way it is. Whoever takes in the opium of the street once will come back for more. Who will ensure so much freedom?" Carefree and careless, girls who continue living in the streets end up in brothels and the city's red-light areas as professional sex-workers.

Maleka is an ex-sex worker, who has made the Chandrima Park in Dhaka City her home. She worked as a housemaid after being deceived by her husband at 14. Out on the streets, she was raped. Then she decided that prostitution is better than being violated over and over again. Now in the last years of her life, she is a lonely beggar.

In Bangladesh, theirs is a tale which needs not to be told or heard.It has been a sight for ages. In the nooks and corners of the city, young girls lurk around in the shade of an over-bridge, platform or empty verandah. Floating like a shadow without an identity and meeting the inevitable fate of vanishing into oblivion--the story of a Bangladeshi child sex worker.