[Blogs Tribune] The Afghans call this revolting act bacha bazi, and it is exactly what it sounds like. Young boys usually ostracised from villages by their families because they were attacked by a paedophile, wearing flowing colourful outfits clad in bells, dancing in seedy places for older turban wearing bearded Afghan men, only to be sexually assaulted after the contemptible night takes a drug and alcohol fuelled turn.BLUF:
From Afghanistan to Pakistan, the common threads in these cases are as old as the act of rape itself. Invariably, the victims are heartbreakingly vulnerable, and invariably, the attackers themselves rationalise their actions by blaming the victim, 'he was asking for it', 'he secretly liked it', or 'he was that type of boy'.
More upsettingly, accepting it as a cultural norm allows the abusers as well as those with the power to stop it, to alleviate feelings of guilt.
Foreign Policy claims that as many as 50 per cent of men in Southern Afghanistan 'take boy lovers'. The leaders of Afghanistan do nothing for fear of losing their hold on power, as any action could offend their voter base. Meanwhile, as far as Pakistan's northern areas are concerned, our own leaders would rather bury their heads in the sand.
This mentality can only be tackled with a concerted effort to revise a cultural norm. Somewhere along the way these people began to assume it was okay to take advantage of a child. For such a perverse act to become acceptable in parts of Pakhtun culture must have taken deep psychological conditioning, especially considering how many victims of sexual abuse become abusers themselves. It shall take equally complex psychological conditioning to invalidate child sex abuse as an acceptable act.
We can only achieve this if our political and religious leaders, filmmakers, educators, journalists, and others use their skills of influence. Shame can be a healthy feeling, but not when it is misused to function as a wall for paedophiles and rapists to cover their wrongdoings. Shame must instead be used as a hammer to break down these walls.