A new danger for sex workers in Bangladesh

We want it A new danger for sex workers in Bangladesh

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
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Joanna Moorhead
The Guardian, Monday 5 April 2010
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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 Dhaka dock nearby. What is strange is that using prostitutes seems to be tolerated in this Muslim country: when I ask our Bangladeshi interpreter about this, he points out that the brothels were established under British rule, during the 18th and 19th centuries.

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 Bangladesh, by madams desperate to make the girls in their employ seem older and more attractive to clients. It has the added bonus of making them less likely to attract the attention of the police – sex workers here must be 18 or over, though the Faridpur brothel is clearly full of girls who are not.

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 Dhaka office, and helped compile the report.

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 Bangladesh, says Islam. "There should be better regulation to stop them selling the drug, but there is not," he says.