Bacha Bazi

[JesusA]

I originally sent a version of the post below to WheelyFixed. He recommended that I post it here. While it involves minors, it is both from a current newspaper account and historical material.

An article about “bacha bazi” in Afghanistan was published in the Daily Mail on March 9, 2025 (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... bused.html). The practice is old, going back centuries, probably millennia. In a society where women are secluded, young boys are often a substitute for both entertainment and sex. We know that young boys and young eunuchs were often taken on long trading journeys in the ancient world to be used sexually by men who had no access to women.

I have written before in several locations of a showing of the documentary film “An Afghan Village” filmed in Aq Kupruk, Balkh Province in northern Afghanistan in 1972. The anthropologist and filmmaker Louis Dupree was available to answer questions after the film.

In the film there is a brief scene in the village coffee shop where a young boy in female costume is dancing in front of an appreciative audience of men and teenage boys. The first question from the audience was about that scene.

Dupree answered that dancing boys were fairly common in Afghanistan and all that was unusual about that scene was that the boy had not been castrated.

Hopefully that part has changed.

Slavery is still rampant in some areas of the world. The last country to make it officially illegal was Mauritania in 1981, although there were no penalties for holding slaves until 2017! I recently found an article published by a professor in Pakistan in 2018. Her research indicated over two million slaves still in Pakistan at that point. She wrote that the price for a 10 to 12 year old Tajik boy was as much as U.S.$ 70,000 and that is was “very normal for older wealthy men to keep young boys for sexual gratification (p.95).”

I've been a member of Anti-Slavery International since 1965 (the current name of the British society founded in 1839 as the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society). I was a first-year student in Arabic and my "language partner," a young Saudi student, went home for the winter holiday. When he returned, we got together for coffee before classes started. He was very excited that his father had bought a new slave to care for his mother and sisters (3 years after the legal abolition of slavery in Saudi Arabia) -- a young eunuch. He estimated that the boy was about 12 years old. I dropped Arabic...
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Hussain, Rabia. (2018). Catch-22 of Modern Slavery in Pakistan. The Explorer Islamabad: Journal of Social Sciences 2(1): 92-98.

[WheelyFixed]

Thanks for posting - it is good to be reminded that slavery is not just something that happened a 'long time ago' and that not all modern eunuchs have a choice in the matter...

Particularly disturbing, but not all that surprising, is that our military forces in Afghanistan were willing to ignore this kind of gross abuse - makes you wonder what they thought they were fighting for (but that is getting a bit far into the political, so lets not go to far here)

WheelyFixed

[marsma]

It sounds like the US military chose to ignore this during their occupation, which is depressing. What happens to these people when they age out of their situation?

[WheelyFixed]

The question about what happens to the boys that "age out" of the role is a good one, I have wondered the same thing... I will pass that on to see if Jesus has any further info about that...

WheelyFixed

[WheelyFixed]

I got a reply from Jesus about this, basically he doesn't have much info...

I haven't looked into the bachi bazi enough to give a definitive answer, but my impression is that those who age out are simply thrown out on the street to fend as best they can. I had a copy of one of the ASI journals before the fire that I haven't been able to find on line from 1953. It centered on the opium trade and slavery in Afghanistan. I remember that it said that large landowners would take a child in place of rent from tenants and that, while girls were preferred, any boys they received would be castrated and used as both farm labor and family servants for the rest of their lives.

WheelyFixed