Child prostitution in Bush’s ‘new’ Afghanistan

This video, from the Dari language section of the Voice of America, is about child labour in Herat, Afghanistan.

By Rakesh Kumar Meena & Dhrubajyoti Bhattacharjee in India:

Children Of Pleasure: A Sad Story Of Afghanistan

By Rakesh Kumar Meena & Dhrubajyoti Bhattacharjee

03 May, 2008
Countercurrents.org

… Trafficking amongst children has turned into one of the major menaces of a developing society amongst which Afghanistan, a war torn and socio-economically dilapidated nation, has turned into one of the major breeding grounds of such a menace after illegal narcotics trafficking.

Amongst the local traditions of Afghanistan, using children as an element of pleasure and entertainment is not out of place and had been banned by the Taliban administrators only after 1996. Especially in places like Bano, some reports hints even at occupying forces of the West taking recourse to such pleasures and entertainment after November 2001. …

In a report placed in the year 2004, an international SOS was sent by the Interior Ministry of Afghanistan to check the ‘growing problem of child abduction. Children from all over the country were being kidnapped and taken abroad for sexual servitude, slave labor, and illicit organ donation.’

‘Afghan children are being kidnapped on their way to school or while playing in parks. The Afghan interior minister, Ali Ahmed Jalali, says that both boys and girls are abducted for both domestic and international markets, to be used for sex or labor, or to provide human organs.’