Bacha bazi

'boy play') refers to a pederasty practice in Afghanistan in which men exploit and enslave adolescent boys for entertainment and/or sexual abuse.

Force and coercion were common, and security officials of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan stated they were unable to end such practices and that many of the men involved in bacha bazi were powerful and well-armed warlords.

Lord Curzon, who visited the court of Abdur Rahman Khan in the late nineteenth century, refers to “dancing-boys” as “an amusement much favored in Afghanistan”; and John Alfred Gray, a British physician who served as the amir's surgeon in the early 1890s, describes a scene of a dozen boys, “aged about thirteen to fourteen,” with long hair and in girls' dress, dancing at the court.

Mahmud Tarzi, a leading intellectual of the time, also makes reference to the presence of both bāzengar (dancing-boys) and kanchini (dancing-girls) in public gatherings of late 19th century Kabul in his memoire.

[22] Ethnomusicologist John Baily commented that organizing gatherings with dancing-bachas was not allowed in Herat in the 1970s, mainly because violent fights often erupted at such events.

[22] German ethnographic research, conducted in the 1970s, observed the widespread practice of dancing boys or bachabozlik among Uzbek populations in northern Afghanistan.

The research found such stances were prevalent among Afghan intellectuals, who either “denied the existence of the phenomenon in Afghanistan or among their own ethnic group” or associated it with illiteracy, gender segregation, and the limited sexual possibilities of rural areas.

[22] According to international relations scholar Lasha Tchantouridze, there is no reliable data about bacha bazi during the socialist era or the way the Soviets handled it during their military operation.

[14] A study published by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) found that 78% of the men who practice bacha bazi are married to a woman.

[3] In 2011, in an agreement between the United Nations and Afghanistan, Radhika Coomaraswamy and Afghan officials signed an action plan promising to end the practice, along with enforcing other protections for children.

[25][14] Reportedly, in early 1994, Omar led 30 men armed with 16 rifles to free two young girls who had been kidnapped and raped by a warlord, hanging him from a tank gun barrel.

[40] The practice of bacha bazi prompted the United States Department of Defense to hire social scientist AnnaMaria Cardinalli to investigate the problem, as ISAF soldiers on patrol often passed older men walking hand-in-hand with young boys.

[44] As a direct result of this incident, legislation was created called the "Mandating America's Responsibility to Limit Abuse, Negligence and Depravity", or "Martland Act" named after Special Forces Sgt.

[46] In a 2013 documentary by Vice Media titled This Is What Winning Looks Like, British independent film-maker Ben Anderson describes the systematic kidnapping, sexual enslavement and murder of young men and boys by local security forces in the Afghan city of Sangin.

The film depicts several scenes of Anderson along with American military personnel describing how difficult it is to work with the Afghan police considering the blatant molestation and rape of local youth.

"[47] In 2015, The New York Times reported that U.S. soldiers serving in Afghanistan were instructed by their commanders to ignore child sexual abuse being carried out by Afghan security forces, except "when rape is being used as a weapon of war".

But the U.S. soldiers have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the U.S. military was arming them against the Taliban and placing them as the police commanders of villages—and doing little when they began abusing children.

[50] According to a report published in June 2017 by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the DOD had received 5,753 vetting requests of Afghan security forces, some of which related to sexual abuse.

The ick factor here is dangerously high, a problem that the production... labors hard to mitigate through aesthetics," and appreciated the romance but wished it had not attempted "a stab at political relevance.

"[54] Jonathan Mandell, writing for New York Theater, said that the Jahander subplot was "one of the ways [Rosser and Sohne] are trying to compensate for their Western perspective and the show's focus on the fictional romance.