He is thirteen years old, fatherless, and has come from Dir in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) to find work. The place he lands is Shahrag (District Harnai), a coal-mining town of Balochistan, where eight mines sit on the Al-Gilani branch of the mountain. When he arrives, the miners' colony stirs. Word moves from shaft to shaft.
Men come from neighbouring mines just to look. His name is Kaleem. He is wearing a black shalwar kameez over a yellow sports shirt. He does not yet understand why everyone is so glad to see him. By nightfall, he will. Dawn reported his story in March 2019. At the same mines, a sixteen-year-old from Swat named Shah Farman had been there since 2017, working as a coal cutter by day and routinely raped by night. When a reporter asked the miners about it, the answer came without hesitation: "It's all normal. "Nobody was arrested. The mines are still open.
I have spent most of my working life on violence against women and girls in Pakistan and South Asia, building programmes, leading coalitions, and founding platforms devoted to exactly this work. I am a feminist, and an intersectional one, which is why I cannot write around what I am about to write. An intersectional feminism that cannot see boys is not intersectional. It is selective.
Names and Terminologies
The literal meaning is "boy play" in Persian and Dari. In parts of Pakistan, particularly in KPK and the former tribal districts, related practices may be referred to colloquially as bacha baazi, bacha bereesh (“beardless boy”), or simply through euphemisms around “keeping boys” for entertainment and service.
In north India, especially in Bihar/Jharkhand and eastern Uttar Pradesh, exploitative performance cultures involving feminised boys are associated with launda naach. Central Asian historical records from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan describe comparable systems under variations of the Persian-rooted term bachabozlik or bacabozlik. The terminology changes by language and locality, but the underlying pattern of vulnerable boys controlled by powerful adult men through money, status, coercion, or debt remains strikingly consistent. It is one of the gravest, least-reported human rights violations in our region. It has been happening for centuries. It is happening now, and the silence around it is not ignorance. It is a choice.
What Is Bacha Bazi?
Boys between roughly six and fifteen years old, orphaned, displaced, or from families crushed by debt, are forced into performing for powerful adult men. They are dressed in women's clothes, made to dance, passed between men, bought and sold as markers of status and wealth. The "owner" may be a warlord, a landlord, a police commander, a cleric, or a mine supervisor. Many boys are held through debt bondage: the family received an advance payment that becomes a permanent chain.
Awareness of HIV and sexually transmitted infections among dancers and the men who abuse them is close to zero
The central contradiction is not accidental. Homosexuality is a criminal offence in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bacha bazi operates in the open, protected by the very officials who enforce those laws. It persists not because it is misunderstood but because the men who run it also run the courts, the police stations, and the mining licences.
It has nothing to do with faith or with self-styled interpretations of Sufi teachings. It has everything to do with power over those who have none.
A Regional Map
Afghanistan is where the practice is most extensively documented. Warlords, military commanders, tribal leaders, police officials, and clergy have historically kept boys as proof of wealth and influence. A 2013 study by Hagar International found that at least half of all trafficked boys under fourteen in Afghanistan were bacha bazi victims. Afghanistan criminalised bacha bazi explicitly in its 2018 penal code, including penalties for officials complicit in the practice.
Enforcement has been close to non-existent. Human rights observers have warned that post-2021 restrictions and institutional collapse may have increased vulnerability for boys. The shame codes of Afghan masculine culture ensure that the boy carries the stigma. The abuser rarely faces even social consequences.
Pakistan sees the practice concentrated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, parts of Punjab, and the coal country of Balochistan. Boys as young as six are trafficked from KPK and Afghanistan to mine sites and subjected to sex trafficking within those same facilities, in some cases with parents deceived by recruiters who described the work very differently. Research in Kasur, Punjab, documented widespread sexual harassment and exploitation among working boys under fourteen.
The U.S. Department of Labour documents this explicitly and repeatedly across its annual Pakistan reports. Police corruption is a load-bearing wall of the entire system: officers take money to ignore complaints, and survivors seeking to register cases are routinely turned away without a bribe.
Bangladesh has been documented by End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking (ECPAT) of Children for Sexual Purposes and its local partner Integrated Community & Industrial Development Initiative in Bangladesh (INCIDIN) as a persistent site of sexual exploitation of boys in informal economies. The subject barely registers in national policy.
Nepal and Sri Lanka both record child sex tourism and trafficking of male children. In both countries, as across the region, boys account for a fraction of formal child protection referrals, not because they are less harmed, but because the systems were not built with them in mind.
India has the launda naach performance tradition, historically associated with periods in which women were excluded from public performance.
A 2007 UNODC field study found that boys recruited predominantly from poor families in West Bengal, with others coming from Bihar, Jharkhand, UP, Nepal, and Bangladesh, migrate to UP and Bihar during the peak wedding seasons of April–June and December–February, contracted by orchestra companies who retain most of their earnings. The same study found that most dancers are sexually exploited before they even reach their destination, and that exploitation continues throughout their time in the profession.
Awareness of HIV and sexually transmitted infections among dancers and the men who abuse them is close to zero. The Diplomat, citing a UNICEF report, puts the proportion of dancers who enter the profession as children at seventy percent a figure broadly consistent with UNODC field observations, though the specific UNICEF source is not named.
Reliable data on whether male-dominated clinical systems are adequately equipped to respond to male child trauma remains extremely limited
Academic research by Rohit Dasgupta, published in Asian Affairs, documents the violence launda dancers face and the near-total absence of any support structure. Once they age past their youth or contract a disease, they are discarded. None of this appears in India's national child protection data in any disaggregated form.
Not Only the Coal Mines
Coal mines are the most documented sites in Pakistan, but the exploitation follows vulnerability wherever it settles.
Brick kilns and carpet workshops in Punjab and Sindh operate as closed systems, with debt-bonded children, adult owners with total authority, no labour inspector willing to visit, and no complaint mechanism that would survive the journey out. Sexual exploitation by owners and supervisors, as a condition of employment or continued accommodation, is documented across all of them.
Truck stops. In KPK, boys searching for food and money gravitate toward truck addas as the long-haul transit points that dot the roads out of Peshawar. ECPAT's 2022 Pakistan report identifies these stops explicitly as known sites of boy sexual exploitation, with a photograph included. Drivers who spend weeks away from home rationalise what they do with language that shifts blame onto poverty, onto distance, onto the boys themselves. The boys are kept as helpers by day. At night, the transaction changes.
Domestic work keeps over 264,000 child workers, many of them boys, inside private homes where no labour law reaches and no outsider enters. Physical and sexual abuse in these settings is documented but largely unprosecuted.
Factories, workshops, tea stalls, wedding venues, auto repair shops, street vending. Across every one of these settings, boys in economic dependence on an adult male employer are at risk. The U.S. Department of Labour notes that in Pakistan, child labourers, particularly boys, are frequently subjected to sexual exploitation to obtain or keep work or accommodation. This is not a footnote in a long report. It is the finding, repeated across five consecutive annual reviews.
The Numbers, and the Gap Behind Them
Children under eighteen living on Pakistan's streets face an eighty to ninety per cent risk of sexual assault. The majority of Pakistan's estimated two million street children are boys. The available UNICEF reporting complicates the assumption that child sexual exploitation and violence are primarily female experiences. Boys appear consistently within protection caseloads, yet remain comparatively invisible in public policy framing and donor discourse.
The NGO Sahil's 2023 national survey documented 1,962 male child victims of abuse alongside 2,251 girls. Nearly one in two reported victims were boys, a reality rarely reflected in headlines, donor narratives, or child protection programming. ECPAT's 2022 Pakistan country report states plainly that in the rare cases where governments collect prevalence data on child sexual exploitation, samples are almost always limited to adolescent girls. The absence of data on boys is not a research gap. It is a funding decision, a policy decision, and a political one.
What It Does to a Child
The clinical literature on survivors is consistent. PTSD is the dominant outcome: flashbacks, dissociation, hypervigilance, and sleep that never fully returns. Survivors show low self-esteem, suicidal ideation, and a shattered sense of identity, particularly among boys who were forced into feminised roles they had no language for. Many turn to drugs to manage what no one around them will name as trauma. Social isolation tends to be permanent. The capacity to trust adult men is gone.
Physically, the damage runs alongside the psychological: rectal trauma from repeated rape, sexually transmitted infections, respiratory disease from coal dust in mine-based cases, malnutrition, and the accumulated effects of hard labour on bodies that were not finished growing. These boys carry two industries' worth of damage in one body.
The cycle is one of the most disturbing documented patterns: many survivors, studies show, repeat harm as adults, not as people who chose cruelty, but as people whose unaddressed trauma, absence of therapeutic care, and distorted early models of power left them with no other map. This is not a moral verdict on the individual. It is a verdict on every government and institution that decided not to intervene. Reliable data on whether male-dominated clinical systems are adequately equipped to respond to male child trauma remains extremely limited.
The health sector needs to treat PTSD, depression, substance dependence, and suicidal ideation in bacha bazi survivors as consequences of child sexual violence, not as conduct problems, family dysfunction, or moral failure
A Global Pattern with Local Names
The practice has deep roots in Central Asia, documented across what is now Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan under the Russian Empire and into Soviet times. It continues in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with noted growth over the past two decades in Pashtun regions in the south and east, and among Tajik communities in the north. Boys in the border areas of Tajikistan are considered at risk by human rights observers, given the strength of cross-border ties with northern Afghanistan.
Beyond the region, the structure repeats wherever the same conditions exist: poverty, male authority without accountability, and children with no adult to turn to. West African boys trafficked into agricultural and fishing labour are regularly sexually exploited at worksites. In Latin America, street-connected boys face abuse by authority figures that follows the same logic as bacha bazi: the adult holds the food, the money, and the threat.
In conflict zones from the DRC to Syria to Myanmar, the UN has documented sexual violence against male children used as a tool of control by armed groups. Some legal scholars argue that the systematic, coercive, and state-enabled nature of bacha bazi could meet the threshold for crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. That argument has not yet become a prosecution.
What the Law Covers and What It Misses
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child protects all children from sexual exploitation (Article 34), trafficking (Article 35), and slavery (Article 37). Both Pakistan and Afghanistan have ratified it. In legal theory, every bacha bazi victim is covered. In practice, CRC monitoring and country-level implementation have been built almost entirely around girls.
The Optional Protocol to the CRC on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography applies to what happens to these boys. It is rarely applied to them. The Palermo Protocol on trafficking covers them. Country reports under it skew heavily toward female victims.
ILO Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour covers commercial sexual exploitation. The data collected under it does not disaggregate male child victims in any way that drives resource allocation.
SDG 16.2 commits member states to ending the exploitation of children. SDG 8.7 targets child labour. Both are broad enough, on paper, to reach these boys. But SDG 5.2 and 5.3, which specifically name sexual violence, child marriage, and female genital mutilation, are written for women and girls. They command the bulk of donor money, government reporting attention, and NGO programming. Everything else gets what is left.
No SDG target names bacha bazi. No UN monitoring body has a specific reporting line for it. CEDAW does not cover it by definition. And the CRC, which does, has never produced accountability for governments whose own security forces appear in the perpetrator column.
The boys fall through the gap between gender-specific targets that exclude them and gender-neutral targets that, in practice, are never applied to them.
The Blind Spot We Need to Name
Patriarchy harms women. It also creates a hierarchy of disposability in which poor, displaced, minority boys are treated as the property of powerful men, and this goes unspoken because the same codes of masculine honour that subordinate women also make male victimhood unspeakable.
The feminisation of victimhood in child protection has had a specific and damaging consequence: it built an entire apparatus around girls and, in doing so, created a space where the abuse of boys could continue without legal sanction, without clinical response, and without a name. Bacha bazi has thrived in that space for decades.
My fellow Ashoka changemaker, Ayesha Baqir, author of Beyond the Fields (which won the Literature Award of the Ladies Fund, Karachi), and whose short fiction appears in anthologies published by Routledge and Om Books International, said something when I shared the idea of this piece with her that I cannot improve on: "I am complicit in the problem. I am part of a complex and chaotic system that perpetuates poverty and exploits children. How can I develop solutions if I am part of the problem? The only way is to fight it outright and to treat every child as if the child were my own."
That quote should be pinned above the desk of every child protection official in this region.
What Needs to Happen
Governments need to enforce laws that already exist. Pakistan has enough legislation on the books to prosecute mine owners, transport operators, and police officers who protect abusers. What it lacks is the political will to apply those laws to powerful men. The bribe economy that insulates perpetrators at every level of the state, documented across U.S. State Department reports year after year, will not dismantle itself.
The international community needs to stop treating practices that harm boys as cultural complexities while treating equivalent practices that harm girls as human rights emergencies. Consistency is not a Western imposition. It is the minimum demand of any rights framework worth the name. The UN's monitoring bodies for the CRC and the Palermo Protocol should develop specific, disaggregated reporting requirements for male child sexual exploitation.
Civil society, including organisations built on women's rights, needs to disaggregate data by sex, fund services for boy survivors, and stop letting donor preferences decide whose suffering gets counted. Mental health care for male survivors needs to be integrated into existing child protection programmes now, not after a new funding cycle.
The health sector needs to treat PTSD, depression, substance dependence, and suicidal ideation in bacha bazi survivors as consequences of child sexual violence, not as conduct problems, family dysfunction, or moral failure.
Journalists need to keep reporting this, despite the fear that makes reporting in KPK and Balochistan genuinely dangerous. The silence that fear produces is exactly what the system runs on.
The boy in Shahrag is not a symbol. He is Kaleem, from Dir, who came to support his family and found himself trapped in a mountain colony where men from three shifts waited for him. Shah Farman, from Swat, spent two years in the same mines being raped while the people around him called it normal.
Neither of them made it into a government report. Neither of them is counted in a UN monitoring dashboard. Neither of them triggered a donor response. Until that changes, those of us who work in child protection, and I include myself in this, are, as Ayesha Baqir says, part of the problem.
Endnote on Data and Terminology: Reliable data on the sexual exploitation of boys in South Asia remains limited due to underreporting, stigma, weak documentation systems, and inconsistent methodologies. Statistics cited here draw from NGO documentation, government and UN reporting, investigative journalism, and international monitoring reports, and should be read as indicative rather than comprehensive. The term bacha bazi is most widely associated with Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, though related exploitative practices exist under different local names and forms across South and Central Asia.