Amrao Manush – the Pavement Dwellers of Dhaka
Bangladesh: 'If we fall asleep the gangs steal our children...'
Lucy Adams
Published on 30 Jan 2010
The Herald, Scotland
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world-news/bangladesh-if-we-fall-asleep-the-gangs-steal-our-children-1.1002578
Smog shrouds the human shadows congregating beneath the wide arc of Bangladesh's national football stadium.
View the slideshow here:
http://www2.newsquest.co.uk/scotland/pdf/Slideshows/300110bangladesh/index.html
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.
Babu has no-one to tie himself to. His mother died of rabies and his father of asthma. Dhaka is one of the world's most polluted cities and deaths from respiratory disease are particularly common on the street. The smog runs the length and breadth of the city, every road clogged with rickshaws, buses and cars. It chokes out the sun and blurs the sunset as yellow fog turns to grey. The pollution, the lack of clean water and the problems people have accessing even rudimentary medical care mean that skin disease, bronchitis and tuberculosis are commonplace.
The only respite from the noise and filth is from 9am to 5pm, when Babu can access one of Concern Worldwide's nine day-centres across the city. The centres support more than 1000 pavement dwellers each day, offering a place for them to rest, wash and cook. Children under five are given nursery education and lunch, allowing their parents to work.
The centres also run savings schemes and encourage young people into vocational training courses to offer them an escape from the streets. The project is called Amrao Manush, meaning "we are people too" in Bengali – a name devised by the pavement dwellers themselves. This year Concern hopes to raise enough money to open night shelters for the most vulnerable, including pregnant women and children. It is at night that the children are normally stolen.
Sufia Begum's son Shakil was taken seven months ago. He has not been seen since. "He was only four years old," she says, tightening her grip on her baby daughter. "It was night and he said he was going to the toilet. He never came back. I ran around screaming, looking for him. I arranged for a big loudspeaker microphone and went all over the city crying his name.
"They say my son has been sold abroad. This happens often. Some children are stolen for the sex trade and others for their body parts. I know that religious people steal children for sacrifices and rituals." She begins to sob. "I still look, but do not know how to find him," she says.
Sufia is just 20, but looks far, far older. Like Babu, she was born on the pavement beneath the stadium's terraces. As with most of the women we meet, Sufia says that, when she went to the police to report her son's abduction, they demanded a home address and a bribe beyond her means. "The police said they would do nothing unless I gave them 5000 taka (£45)," she says. "All I had in savings was 500 taka (£4.50). Now I am afraid to sleep at night in case someone tries to steal my daughter. I am saving money but it is difficult. I just want somewhere safe for my children."
Sufia gets about 100 taka (70p) a day from begging. Like the majority of the pavement dwellers, she has few possessions and no identity card, nor any chance of obtaining one without a birth certificate or address. Fewer than 10% of children in Bangladesh are registered at birth. This, coupled with high levels of police corruption, compounds the vulnerability of the pavement dwellers. Officials speak about them as if they are not citizens, not even human. "So many people are totally without basic rights," says Nina Goswami, a human-rights advocate who works with Concern and other similar organisations. "We are trying to improve the police and change their behaviour, but it will not change in just one or two years. Their practice of asking for bribes is long established."
Women's standing is epitomised by the fact it is still legal and socially acceptable to beat one's wife. The Women And Children Repression Act of 2003 includes sections on abduction, rape and being forced into the sex trade. However, lawyers say there is a huge gap between legislation and reality. "Even when a new law is passed, no-one is told," says Goswami. "People don't know what their rights are, even if they could pursue them. Our constitution says men and women are equal but in reality that is not the case. Some of the laws we already have are good, but few know they exist and most people are terrified of the police."
The maximum punishment for rape is the death penalty. For trafficking it is life in prison, but the cases do not make it to court. "There is a programme of legal aid but it hasn't worked," says Goswami. "The prosecution is meant to be funded by the government but they usually also demand money from the victim. It is illegal to rape a woman or child but the man will be so threatening that the woman will not come forward. Even if she does it is usually settled out of court with a fine. Only about 10% of the women who come forward would ever go to court."
Ms Goswami works with some of Dhaka's four million slum dwellers. They live in squalor – but pavement dwellers such as Sufia aspire to such a lifestyle. "I am saving for the future," she says, "when I hope to live under a roof in the slum."
Women's position as second-class citizens, along with the burden of having to pay a dowry to marry off daughters, makes girls particularly vulnerable to abuse. Research commissioned by Concern and conducted by local academics found that almost half of the pavement dwellers cited environmental reasons and natural disasters as their primary reason for moving to Dhaka. A quarter cited poverty and a further 15% were motivated by family problems. Many of the women say they came to the city specifically to escape abusive stepmothers.
Shuvashish Karmakar, project officer with Amrao Manush, says this Cinderella phenomenon is particularly common in rural areas. "So much of it is to do with class and social standing," he explains. "A year ago, a new policy was introduced to try to reduce inequality and give women access to education. Even on the buses they found it hard to get a seat. Now there are nine seats out of 48 reserved for women. Some 75% of the people we support in the centres are women and children and most of them have been beaten by their partners. The government does not really do a great deal to tackle domestic abuse, and although we have a female Prime Minister and female head of the opposition, the problems with social structures and traditional systems and beliefs still exist."
Unable to escape their social status with a glass slipper, many of the pavement women, most of whom leave home before they are 10 years old, attribute themselves the surname Begum, which means Queen. As with Sufia, Ratna claims the name as her own. Now 21, she still remembers the bus she took with her stepmother, the confusion and noise of the city compared to village life in Shirazgonj, 250km away, and the shock of being sold to a Dhaka brothel for about 3000 taka (£25). She was just six years old.
"It was terrifying," she says. "I cried and cried. Three men visited my room for sex at the same time. Two other girls and I plotted our escape. After three months we bribed the gatemen and we ran away. I have been living on the street since then."
Ratna, whose name means "ornaments", sleeps all day at one of the Concern centres in order to be vigilant on the streets at night. "I have to stay awake to ensure my nine-month-old son, Jannati, is safe," she says. "Two years ago my other baby boy was stolen. He was eight months old. I went straight to the police but they said I should not be a mother, that I should not have brought a child into the world because I am a pavement dweller. They beat me."
Ratna spends her nights beneath the wide, white arches of the railway station with hundreds of others. Passengers file past them as if they were invisible. Nearby, political posters and commercial advertisements offering eternal youth float in the acrid breeze like prayer flags. Barbed wire, freshly painted, surrounds the dwindling vegetation.
"Sleeping on the pavement, we face many problems," Ratna says. "The first is sexual abuse. I have been raped and there is little way of protecting yourself. The second is the police beatings and environmental problems like rain and flooding and sickness. The third, and worst, is our children being stolen. My husband is not here very often so he cannot protect us. We desperately need night centres so we can sleep in safety."
For most of those we speak to, the story is the same. A few metres away, in the shelter of a disused toilet block, Shati Begum lays out some newspapers and plastic on the ground before unfurling a colourful sari upon which she will sleep. Aged 25, she is seven months pregnant. Five months ago, her seven-year-old son was taken in the night. "We were sleeping next to each other," she says. "I was so tired because of the pregnancy. When I awoke, he was gone.
"I was crying and looking for him. I went to the police straight away with a photograph but they said they were not interested and wouldn't even write it down. They said that as a pavement person I had no identity and that they did not care. They said I needed an address and an identity card."
Shati still carries the photograph of her son but has given up hope of finding him. "Dhaka is a mega-city but its capacity is limited," says Afsana Akther of Dhaka City Corporation, which runs the city. "Children on the street are so vulnerable to sexual exploitation and trafficking. We can't cope with the numbers coming here. The government needs to take a stronger line and work with the international community to tackle trafficking."
Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world, and almost 40% of its 156 million inhabitants live below the poverty line of one US dollar a day. A report in 2002 put the country's total number of street children at about two million across.
"These people have no stability," says Mostafa Quaium Khan, executive director of the Coalition For the Urban Poor in Dhaka. "They are floating without certainty, helpless, stricken by poverty and denied their minimum rights. They have come here often from terrible conditions but when they arrive they find they are even more helpless. Climate change is affecting Bangladesh very badly and millions more will be more seriously affected in future. Migration to the cities will increase and Dhaka will become unliveable, even in the next three to five years."
The city's population is growing by 9% a year, thousands being lured by the hope of work and safer housing – but there is nowhere for them when they arrive. Khan believes one answer is to get people into work. "Government needs to provide educational and vocational training and then see the benefits of these people working and paying tax," he says. "The social and economic development of our country is not possible if we exclude them. Those who have been on the pavement for a long time have so few aspirations that it is difficult. Surviving today is enough – but the children still believe things can change."
Rabeya Khatum has been a sex worker at the ferry port for the past three years but she still believes her life will improve. Aged 14, her street name is Smriti. Tonight she will sleep on the jetty at Sadargat where people are queuing for ferry tickets amid piles of green coconuts, spluttering engines and ringing rickshaw bells. Putrefied fish and pieces of polystyrene shift back and forth on the shoreline. "I do not want to do this work, and in February I'm starting a vocational sewing course," says Khatum, smiling. "The Concern project gives us 50 taka a day while training so we have enough money for food. I have already saved 1060 taka with the Concern savings account. I plan to save enough to buy a sewing machine and rent a house so I can start my own business. I do not want to do the type of work I have been doing."
Rabeya was one when her mother died, and her stepmother hit her regularly. Aged six, she was beaten so badly that she was unconscious for two days. "The villagers encouraged me to run away because it was so bad, but I was naive," she says. On the way to the ferry, she explains, she was duped by the kindness of strangers, dragged into the jungle and gang-raped by a group of boys. "They beat to death the one boy who pleaded with them to let me go," she says. Rescued by a farmer, she escaped to Dhaka and tried to work as a domestic servant, but struggled to earn enough to eat. Starving, prostitution seemed the only option – but she still dreams of having her own roof and business.
Babu, too, has dreams. Currently he survives by begging. The pavement dwellers say that being particularly young or having scars or deformities helps, as you earn more.
On a good day he makes the equivalent of 45p – enough for two meals. He likes to play hide and seek with his friends – and football too, which he tells me he loves. Despite living beneath the stadium, neither he nor his friends even own a ball. His dream is to be a pilot. "And one day," he says before lying down to sleep, "I would like a roof."
__._,_.___
