Bangladesh under the paedophile’s gaze

Ours is still one of those countries where two male friends sharing a room in some random hotel will not raise any eyebrows or questions about their sexual motivations. Similarly, a man walking into a rented room for a night with two teenagers or pre-teen children won’t even be asked any probing questions unless the children look distressed and appear to be intimidated.

This premise of non-suspicion perhaps offers the most secure ground for paedophilic porn-makers to operate. What a paradox – while the moral guardians of society group up to evict sex workers from a red light area on the pretext of safeguarding values, young children are being lured to acting in pornographic movies to be sent abroad.

It’s shocking because no processions are brought out to root out deviant sexual practices that are taking advantage of our one-dimensional approach to protecting social norms. A child pornography maker, Tipu Kibria, had been featured on the front pages after being nabbed by the police.

After investigation, grisly details have come forth. Reportedly, Kibria had been making such movies, using destitute children, for over nine years. So, we can safely assume that by now he has victimised close to 100 children at the very least.

Thinking beyond the video shooting of sexual acts being performed by young boys, what we face is the initiation of young children into unnatural acts of intimacy. One does not need to be a certified sociologist to state that once the mind is attuned to unorthodox behaviour, the road to more experiments – no matter how distorted – cannot be far off.

While the child-porn maker is in custody, the young children who have, at one point or another, decided to act in porn for money are out there in the open. Their impressionable minds are already receptive to the notion of casting aside inhibitions in front the camera – a profoundly worrying aspect.

Newspaper reports also state that Kibria sent these videos to buyers based around 13 different countries, which means that in the years he has been engaged in this unspeakable trade, a formidable international operation has come to being which identifies Bangladesh as a supplying country. Arresting the man definitely deserves praise, but we will be naïve to expect that Tipu Kibria was the only man involved in this business.

As the pernicious tentacles of paedophilia reach out to developing nations, where desperation drives people to cross the line of sanity quite regularly, the need to concentrate more on the perverted aspects of sexuality rises. Shutting down brothels is not the priority, clamping down on child pornography is. Red light areas have been integral parts of almost all urban centres for centuries. Instead of getting closed, these establishments need to be well regulated, with constant presence of health awareness clinics plus advocacy units.

Uprooting sex workers from a protected zone means putting them in a vulnerable setting, where all sorts of exploitation can take place. Today, we find a child-porn maker, tomorrow there may be the discovery of another filmmaker producing fetishist videos focusing on sadistic pleasures. The cardinal rule of pornography is that unless it’s regulated, sinister branches will form.

Interestingly, in Bangladesh, the entire issue of pornography is being forcefully categorised in one simplistic definition where the suggested approach is a full-on ban with the underscoring of a strict moral code. This approach is absurd because when puritans talk about “accepted behaviour” they simply generalise, leaving out countless evolved nuances in sexual relations that have come to exist with the progression of human society. One cannot simply divide porn into “good” and “bad” because there are plenty in between.

Let’s admit – the war against general pornography cannot be won. As the internet makes us empowered in communicating freely, it also opens millions of doors to give us the oldest pleasures of mankind in hundreds of different forms. What can and should be done is filtering porn that involves people below the age of 18, or which deviates grossly from what society generally accepts as normal.

Behaviour which we usually deem kosher or, in certain cases, exotically adventurous in real life, is often denounced by the moral brigade as being utterly repulsive. Sorry to say, unless we adopt a flexible approach, the insidious damage caused by child porn, slave porn, or other abhorrent materials, cannot be contained.

Right here is a hypothetical scenario – young sex workers driven out of a brothel are kept in an apartment where they are forced to participate in dark sexual deeds, involving relentless hours of inflicting pain.

Soon, the demand will be for more variation, leading to who knows what – maybe even physical deformation. I remember a film called 8mm, where an investigator traces the production of snuff movies – a perverted sort of pornography where the victim is killed in the end.

To add real-life perspective: Recently, a policeman in Germany sent shockwaves across the globe with the chilling revelation that he killed and dismembered a consenting man in front of a video camera to cater to the unusual tastes of certain clients.

That act may seem too extreme at the moment, though in an age of globalisation, buttressed by the frenzied use of the web, no act is too impossible to be replicated. And, for good reasons, developing nations are the prime targets.

At least in most red light zones, there is a boundary which no sex worker is forced to cross.

Surely, it takes some time to digest the fact that child porn was being made in Bangladesh, however, in a country where hypocrisy always creates a nebulous layer over sexual credo, it’s always difficult to get the true picture.

On one side, the so-called conservative champions storm brothels to kick out sex workers; on the other, local films blithely follow the “expose to the limit” in item numbers popularised by Indian movies. Similarly, red light districts for the common person are raided, while top class escorts run raging business through online sites. The unvarnished truth: Kibria is just another product of a society which is dubious and duplicitous.

People like him take advantage of so many grey areas plus double standards, while the meaningless rants of the puritans maintain the deception of normalcy.