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Dark Secret

Daulatdia may look like any other slum in Bangladesh, but those who make the journey here know otherwise. This place hides a dark secret.

Inside, the town feels like a vast street market. There are lines of stalls selling food, mobile phone shops, and even a barber’s shop, but there is something strange about this place.
 

Something terrible.

Daulatdia town

Daulatdia brothel is home to 1,500 sex workers who depend on prostitution for their survival. Such places are deliberately kept in obscurity and hidden from the eyes of the mainstream society.

daulatdia trucks

Truck drivers make up the largest number of men who visit Daulatdia brothel, Trucks transporting rice, jute, sugar cane and fish across the country, queue here for two, sometimes three days, waiting for the ferry that will carry them over the river. While they wait, many of them pass the time in the alleyways and rooms burrowed inside Daulatdia, paying for the company of women who depend on the meagre income these grim interludes bring.

daulatdia lanes

Daulatdia brothel is one of the largest brothels in the world. It is, in fact, so large that it has developed its own economy, with tailors, beauty shops, cigarette shops, phone shops and food stores.

Daulatdia graves

It is here, in unmarked graves, in the rocky, rubbish-strewn field behind Daulatdia brothel that most of the women who live here will end their days. The social status of sex workers in Bengali society is considered so low, that regardless of whether they are Hindu, Muslim or Christians, the sex workers who live here are denied burial on consecrated ground.

Walk just a few paces down a tiny side street, along the crumbling lanes, and you come to another world entirely.
 
Corridors of metal give way to innumerable doors, and behind each one is a tiny room with a barred window, and just enough space for a bed where the girls take their customers.
 
Daulatdia is a brothel, the size of a small town, a place where human trafficking, underage prostitution, and drugs are commonplace. 
 
It is home to 1500 sex workers who depend on prostitution for their survival, most of them young girls, and many of them forced into sexual slavery, sold to a pimp or a madam, to whom they owe a debt. 
 
The children live with their mothers in rooms as small as 99 square feet. When mothers bring their customers home, they push the children outside to play in the alleyway. Some mothers tie bells around their waists to keep track of them.
 
The girls who are born here are highly vulnerable to sexual abuse, and are slowly groomed for future work here, but the boys can be exploited too. Customers will often use them to run errands, fetching alcohol and drugs, placing gambling bets, giving massages and, finally, cleaning up after the clients have left them alone. 
 
That is why the children who are born here, spend their entire lives trying to escape.
 
Some never make it.
 
Aklema is one of those. She spent her whole life tying to escape.
 
It is difficult to listen to Aklema talk about her situation and the life she has lived.
"I would not like to think of his life, without the school.”
But her son, Aahil has a plan.
 
And with your help he hopes to make it happen.
 
Every day he goes to school.
 
He works hard.
 
He has set his mind on becoming a police officer.
 
 
And if they can leave Daulatdia he knows his mum will be safe.
 
“This place is not a good place at all,” Aahil says. “I want to bring out my mother from the filthy environment of the brothel when I grow up.”
 
But that dream will never become a reality without an education. And our school is the place in Daulatdia where children like Aahil can get one.
 
 
"I would not like to think of his life, without the school.”Aklema says. "Thanks to the [Save the Children] school, he is reading and writing. He is singing and reciting poetry and when he grows up he wants to be a policeman.”
 
She is overjoyed that the Save the Children School provides her son with a safe and loving environment. And most importantly she now has hope, hope that her child will escape the brothel to a brighter future. 
 
It is difficult to listen to Aklema talk about her situation and the life she has lived.
 
She knows that if her son doesn't get an education and a good job, both of them will probably die here, buried beside the railway line in an unmarked grave. This is how it is for most sex workers driven into deprivation, ridden with diseases.
 
And she knows our school offers them the only real chance of another life, one worth living.
 
“I have no dreams for myself anymore.” Aklema says. “I’m living an awful life. But I dream that my son will be educated and have a normal life.”
 
That is why she hopes and prays that our school will never close.