End Bacha Bazi

In 2015, some of my peers and I produced a report exposing the realities of many innocent Afghan children: bacha bazi.

The practice of human trafficking may be defined as "the harboring, transport, recruitment, or receipt of persons by means of force, deception, abduction, and abuse for the purpose of exploitation" (UNODC).

One prolonged tradition of child trafficking occurs in Afghanistan, where boys aged 11 or 12 are picked off the street, and then taken into ownership of wealthy traffickers. In some cases, the parents of these boys are consulted prior, with a large sum of cash being awarded to the parents in exchange for the child's services (Ansari, Noman). The practice was illegal under the rule of the Taliban between 1993 and 2001, and was considered socially unacceptable under Sharia law. Now, without pressure from the ruling Taliban, bacha bazi has grown to be more acceptable within the Pashtun.

Afghanistan's judiciary system is broken, and foreign intervention on the issue has been stagnant. Internal and international solutions are offered by our report, centered around the notion of an honor-driven system first detailed by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Here is an excerpt from the report, of which you may find the full contents through this link.

The laws established by the Taliban attest to the possibility for an effective government strategy to eliminate these practices. Sharia law forced bacha bazi to run underground and retard; thus, a reformed Afghan constitution and justice system could do the same. Of course, no government should aim to mimic the specific actions of the Taliban, especially in its use of violence that often violated many human rights. A reformed justice system should thereby adapt the successful surveillance and enforcement techniques from the Taliban to a plan consistent with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, others suggest that Afghan and global citizens have roles to play in producing a cultural change as well.

Author Kwame Anthony Appiah develops his theory on moral revolutions in his book, T​he Honor Code.​He considers three historical examples of immoral practices that once represented metrics of honor but were later overturned through moral revolutions. Appiah then applies the lessons of those examples to recommending a way to terminate the practice of honor killing found primarily in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In a similar fashion, we may apply those lessons to ending the rampant bacha bazi found in Afghanistan.​

In the style of Appiah, we summarize that the current standard for honor within the honor world of elite Afghan men includes the number of bachas (boys) to which one has access; and the Afghan people have not placed much emphasis on an individual achieving honor by upholding sharia law or by punishing its abusers. We recommend that the Afghan people reevaluate their definitions of honor by appealing to a communal sense of honor. Similarly to how the Chinese ended footbinding by convincing the populace that the practice was a disgrace to all of China, especially when viewed by foreign observers, the population of Afghanistan should work to appeal to a communal identity. As Appiah writes, “One route to change... [means] persuading people that their honor practice [brings] collective dishonor on them, in the face of a wider honor world. This is the strategy of collective shaming.”

Moreover, foreign observers can enforce this idea by expressing disappointment in the continuation of such as diabolical act as bacha bazi in Afghanistan. However, as Appiah stresses, the outside world must not act in such a way as to appear uncomprehending to the culture and religion of the Afghan people. Otherwise, all of the work meant to expel bacha bazi could instead fuel a nationalist revolt that values bacha bazi as its defiant action against an ignorant world. Rather, Appiah explains the usefulness of appealing to the very morals that underlie Afghan law and culture: Islam. “Insisting that honor killing is un-Islamic–that the shame attaches not to Islam but to [Afghanistan] and its failure to enforce the very Muslim ideals that its constitution claims are at the heart of the nation’s project–is, for that reason, crucial."