Cocaine Magazine

After 12 years entrapped in sexual slavery herself, she was given a girl as a gift by a customer eight years ago, moving from exploited to exploiter overnight. When the girl escaped, she bought a second

“All the girls here are helpless,” he says. “You can’t sell a boy to a brothel, but you can sell a girl because she has monetary value.” He doesn’t feel guilty for paying for sex with a trafficked teenager. “I am in love with Labonni. I’m 70% sure that one day I will rescue her.” Labonni doesn’t look up. “I don’t believe anything the men say to me any more,” she says later. “They all lie.”

Four floors down from Labonni’s bedroom, Farada, 33, says the number of trafficked girls has increased since she arrived at the brothel in 1999. She knows, she says, because she buys them.

Girls as young as 12 sleep five to a room; their beds only cordoned off by torn cotton curtains. Music blares from heavyset sound systems and homemade liquor is poured from plastic bottles to numb the pain. Men swagger shirtless down the alleys looking for girls. Ten minutes of sex will cost them TK400 (about £3.66) – but it’s money that mainly lands in the pockets of those running the brothel.

“Sometimes I wake up and I don’t understand why I’m not dead yet,” she says.

Now 19, Labonni says she’s resigned to life – and death – in Mymensingh, a brothel village in the centre of Bangladesh. Here, between 700 and 1,000 women and girls are working in the sex trade; many of them against their will.

On the run at 13 years old, she left her six-month-old daughter behind to flee the abusive husband she had been made to marry the year before, in a ceremony that took place on the same day she started her period. “I didn’t know where I was going,” she remembers. “I thought maybe I could find work in a garment factory.”

In Bangladesh (according to Save an Orphan): "approximately 4.9 million children between the ages of 5-14 work, often very long hours in hazardous conditions on very low wages. Orphans and street children in Bangladesh often are thrown in jail for petty crimes, or they are abused and subjected to the most atrocious violence; the majority of orphanages are overcrowded and do not have the capacity to take in these children, therefore they are forced to rummage through landfills for food and plastics to sell.  

Bink Baghdad

@binkbaghdad photo by @funzito

With his new mixtape coming up we here at CokeMag decided it would be perfect to have a conversation with him.