First Papiya was forced into marriage at 12 years old. Then she was trafficked into sexual slavery. The country with the highest rate of marriage involving girls under the age of 15 in the world, and where , to , children and young women have been trafficked into prostitution, the two forms of abuse are tightly intertwined. Traffickers prey on the vulnerable, and child marriage is what makes girls like Papiya vulnerable in the first place.
But international donors, policymakers, and even the U. Since March , I have interviewed over women trapped behind the walls of four brothels in Bangladesh, in an investigation that was funded by the nonprofit organization Girls Not Brides.
Half of the girls I spoke with told me that they had been married before the age of 18 and believed they had been trafficked into sexual slavery as a direct result. Yet for all the obvious overlap, trafficking and child marriage in Bangladesh are viewed independently of one another by the U. State Department βand initiatives to end both are kept separate as a result.
While child marriage is largely approached by nonprofit organizations through a lens of legislative lobbying and education as prevention, counter-trafficking efforts center on rescue, rehabilitation, and prosecution. Projects that work to prevent trafficking focus on unmarried girls who are still in school. Approximately 52 percent of girls in Bangladesh are lost in the chasm between child marriage prevention and trafficking rehabilitation: coerced into marriage as children and left without the support they need to protect themselves and safely break out.
Customers pass time with Papiya at the Kandipara brothel where Mohammed Ashreful, in yellow, has lived since his childhood, on Aug. Allison Joyce for Foreign Policy. Papiya was still trapped in a brothel in the village of Kandipara when I first met her in March As the sun rose, she spotted a rickshaw driver sleeping by the side of the road and begged him for help.
