Disturbing History - The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

This episode of the Disturbing History Podcast contains graphic discussion of child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and violence against minors. The content is historically accurate and factually sourced but extremely disturbing in nature. Listener discretion is strongly advised and this episode is not suitable for younger audiences.The dancing boys of Afghanistan represent one of the darkest and most deeply hidden traditions in human history. In this episode of the Disturbing History Podcast, we uncover the true story behind the ancient Afghan practice known as Bacha Bazi — a term that translates to "boy play" — and trace the full history of child sexual exploitation in Afghanistan from its origins in ancient Central Asian pederasty to the modern era.We begin with the Bacha Bazi origins that stretch back thousands of years, exploring how ancient pederasty in Central Asia took root through Greek influence during Alexander the Great's conquest and evolved through the courts of Ghaznavid sultans and Mughal emperors where Afghan boys were forced to dance for powerful men.We examine the Pashtun cultural practices that allowed this tradition to flourish openly, particularly in Kandahar, where the Bacha Bazi tradition became a symbol of wealth and power among tribal leaders and Afghan warlords whose child abuse went unchallenged for generations. This episode explores how the British colonial encounter with Afghanistan's dark traditions during the Anglo-Afghan Wars produced the first Western documentation of the practice — and how geopolitical interests ensured that nothing was done about it. We follow the history of child trafficking in Afghanistan through the Soviet invasion, which created a generation of orphans vulnerable to exploitation, and into the warlord era of the 1990s where Afghan child exploitation reached unprecedented levels and helped spark the rise of the Taliban. We dig into the complicated truth behind the Taliban Bacha Bazi ban — a crackdown rooted not in concern for children's rights but in rigid religious authoritarianism — and the hypocrisy that undermined it from within.From there, we confront the US military Afghanistan abuse cover up, where American soldiers were ordered to ignore the exploitation happening in the compounds of allied Afghan commanders. We tell the story of Charles Martland in Afghanistan, the Green Beret who was punished for defending a child from his rapist, and the Marine Lance Corporal whose pleas to intervene went unanswered before he was killed on base.This Bacha Bazi documentary-style episode examines how the practice operates in the modern era — the recruitment of boys, the economics of the trade, the gatherings where children perform, and the devastating aftermath for survivors. We close with the Afghan dancing boys true story as it stands today under renewed Taliban rule, where a humanitarian crisis is driving new waves of child exploitation even as the regime claims to oppose it.This episode draws from historical texts, investigative journalism including New York Times reporting on human rights in Afghanistan, documentaries by journalist Najibullah Quraishi, PBS Frontline coverage, and reports from Human Rights Watch, UNICEF, and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission documenting the child sexual exploitation history that continues to shape Afghanistan today.If you or someone you know is affected by child exploitation, contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-843-567

In every corner of the United Kingdom and in every shadowed place across the world, there are stories the daylight can't explain. Whispers of figures that vanish into thin air, footsteps that follow when you're alone, and encounters with the paranormal that leave the living forever changed. On the Haunted UK podcast, we journey into these mysteries, exploring chilling accounts of hauntings, terrifying paranormal events and real stories.

from listeners who've witnessed the impossible. Each episode is crafted with immersive soundscapes, meticulous research and storytelling that pulls you straight into the dark. So if you're captivated by the unexplained, if you seek the truth behind the world's most haunting experiences, then follow us, carefully, because once you begin listening, you may start to hear things too.

The Haunted UK podcast. Available now on all major podcast platforms. Ever wonder how dark the world can really get? Well, we dive into the twisted, the terrifying, and the true stories behind some of the world's most chilling crimes. Hi, I'm Ben. And I'm Nicole. Together we host Wicked and Grim,

a true crime podcast that unpacks real-life horrors one case at a time. With deep research, dark storytelling, and the occasional drink to take the edge of, off. We're here to explore the wicked and reveal the grim. We are wicked and grim. Follow and listen on your favorite podcast platform. Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact.

This is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone.

You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. There are episodes of this podcast that I look forward to researching. Stories that, even when they're dark, carry some thread of justice or redemption, that makes the whole thing feel worthwhile. And then there are episodes like this one. episodes where I sit at my desk, stare at the research in front of me, and genuinely wonder whether I've got the stomach to walk you through what I've found.

This is one of those episodes, but here's the thing, and I've said this before, so forgive me if it sounds familiar. Sometimes we've got to disturb history to dig deep and get the truth. Sometimes the history disturbs us, and sometimes, like right now, we get both. Both barrels. No filter. No way to dress it up and make it palatable. Tonight, we're going to Afghanistan.

Not to talk about war, though war plays its part. Not to talk about terrorism, though that's woven in there too. We're going to talk about children, boys specifically, some as young as nine or ten years old. Boys who are bought, sold, traded, dressed up, and forced to dance for rooms full of powerful men. Boys whose childhoods are stolen in the most grotesque way imaginable. And it's all done out in the open, not in back alleys, not in darkened basements. Out in the open, at parties, at gatherings, under the protection of warlords and police commanders and politicians.

They call it Batchabazi. In Dari, it translates loosely to boy play. And if those two words together don't make your skin crawl, then just wait. Because what that innocent sounding phrase actually describes is one of the most widespread, deeply entrenched systems of child sexual exploitation in the modern world. And it's not new. It didn't spring up during the chaos of the Soviet invasion or the Taliban years or the American occupation. This tradition, if we can even stomach calling it that, stretches back centuries, possibly millennia.

Now, I want to be upfront with you about something. I'm a former law enforcement officer, 16 years on the job. I've seen the worst that human beings can do to each other, and I thought I'd built up a pretty thick skin. But when I started digging into the history of Bacabazi, I'll be honest. It shook me. Not because the facts are hard to find. They're not. This stuff is well documented. Journalists, human rights organizations, military personnel, historians. They've all written about it. What shook me is how old this practice is, how openly it's been conducted for generations, and how little the rest of the world seems to care.

So tonight we're going to care. We're going to trace this dark tradition from its earliest roots in Central Asian history. Through the courts of Afghan kings and Mughal emperors, through the British colonial period when Western eyes first witnessed it and looked away, through the Soviet era, the Taliban's brutal crackdown,

and into the modern age where American and NATO soldiers were told, ordered to ignore the screams of boys, chained to beds in the compounds of our Afghan allies. This episode isn't easy listening. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. But these boys deserve to have their story told. The full story. Not the sanitized version.

Not the version where we skip the uncomfortable parts because they make a squirm. So if you're in a place where you can listen, really listen. Then stay with me. And if you need to step away at any point, I completely understand. No judgment. But for those of you who stay, let's get into it. To understand Bacabazi, you've got to understand something fundamental about the region we're talking about. Afghanistan sits at a crossroads.

It's always been a crossroads. For thousands of years, empires have marched through those mountain passes. Persians, Greeks, Mongols, moguls, British, Soviets, Americans. Every one of them left something behind. Cultural DNA. Bits and pieces of tradition that got absorbed into the fabric, of Afghan society like dye soaking into cloth. And here's where it gets complicated, because the practice of keeping young boys for entertainment, and let's be clear about what entertainment really

means here, isn't unique to Afghanistan. It's not even unique to Central Asia. Versions of it have existed across cultures throughout human history. The ancient Greeks had their own version, and they dressed it up in the language of mentorship and education. They called it Padaristi, and it was woven into the social fabric of Athens and Sparta alike. Older men, men of status, would take adolescent boys under their wing. The relationship was framed as educational, philosophical, even noble. But at its core, it was the sexual exploitation of minors by powerful adults who'd built an entire cultural framework to justify it.

Now, I'm not saying Bacabazi is a direct descendant of Greek pederasty. The historical lines aren't that clean. But when Alexander the Great marched his armies through what is now Afghanistan around 330 BC, he didn't just conquer territory. He planted Greek culture in those mountains like seeds. The cities he founded, places like Iconum in northeastern Afghanistan, became centers of Hellenistic culture where Greek customs, including attitudes toward sexuality and the role of young boys in male social spaces,

took root alongside local traditions. and those local traditions already had their own history. The ancient civilizations of Central Asia, the Bactrians, the Sogdians, the various peoples who lived along the Silk Road, had complex social structures where power, hospitality, and entertainment were deeply intertwined. Wealthy men demonstrated their status through lavish gatherings. Music, dance, and the presentation of beautiful young people were central to those displays of wealth and influence. We know from archaeological evidence that the Bactrian civilization, which flourished in what is now northern Afghanistan from roughly 2000 BC onward, had elaborate court cultures centered on display and performance. Gold artifacts recovered from Bactrian burial sites, including the famous Bactrian gold discovered at Tilia Tepe in 1978, depict musicians, dancers, and figures in elaborate ceremonial dress.

While we can't draw a straight line from these ancient court entertainments to modern Bacabazi, they tell us that the association between power, performance, and the display of beautiful young bodies is deeply rooted in the cultural soil of this region. The Kushan Empire, which controlled much of Central Asia and Northern India from the first to the third century AD, left behind temple freezes and sculptures that depict young dancers and performers in context that suggest they held a specific social role in court life. The Kashans were cultural synthesizers, blending Greek, Persian, Indian, and Central Asian traditions

into something unique. And in that cultural mixing bowl, the idea of young performers, trained, costumed, presented for the pleasure of powerful men, appears to have been a consistent ingredient. The Silk Road itself played a role that we can't ignore. For centuries, it wasn't just goods that traveled those ancient trade routes. Ideas traveled, cultural practices traveled, and so did people, including enslaved children.

The trade networks that connected China to Rome ran directly through Afghan territory, and along those roots, a commerce in human beings thrived alongside the commerce in silk and spices. Young boys and girls were bought and sold at market towns throughout Central Asia, and some of those children ended up in the households of powerful men, who kept them for purposes that had nothing to do with domestic labor. But let's fast forward a bit, because the practice really starts to take recognizable shape during the medieval Islamic period. And here's where we need to have an honest conversation about something sensitive. Islam as a religion explicitly prohibits homosexuality.

The Quran is clear on this point. The hadith, the sayings and traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, reinforce it. Mainstream Islamic theology across every major school of thought condemns sexual acts between men. Full stop. That's not up for debate among Islamic scholars, and I want to be respectful of that theological position. But here's the uncomfortable truth. The prohibition against homosexuality in Islamic law created a strange and terrible loophole in practice. Because the prohibition was understood to apply to acts between men, between adults.

There were those who rationalized that boys who hadn't yet reached puberty existed in a kind of gray area. They weren't yet men in the fullest sense. They were beardless. They were smooth-skinned. And in the twisted logic of powerful men looking for justification, that distinction became a license. This isn't speculation.

It's documented in historical texts from across the Islamic world. Medieval poets, and were talking about celebrated canonical poets, wrote openly and often ecstatically about the beauty of beardless boys. In Persian literature, the figure of the Amrod, the beardless youth, became a recurring object of desire in poetry that was read and celebrated in royal courts from Baghdad to Samarkand to Kabul. The great Persian poet Rumi, who's beloved in the West for his spiritual verses about love and the divine, wrote poems that scholars have long debated regarding their references to beautiful youths.

The poet Hafez of Shiraz filled his verses with references to the Saaki, the young cupbearer, whose beauty was compared to moonlight and roses. Now, defenders of these poets argue that these references are metaphorical, that the beautiful youth represents the divine, that it's all spiritual allegory. And maybe in some cases that's true. But you can't separate the poetry from the culture that produced it. And that culture had a very real, very physical tradition of people. powerful men keeping beautiful boys.

During the Ghaznavid Empire, which ruled much of Afghanistan and parts of India and Iran from the 10th to the 12th centuries, the practice of keeping dancing boys was well established in court life. Sultan Mahmoud of Ghazni, one of the most powerful rulers in the Islamic world, was known for his attachment to his slave, Malik Ayyaz, who'd been a young boy when he was first brought to the Sultan's court. Their relationship became one of the most faithful. famous love stories in Persian literature, celebrated by poets for centuries. But let's strip away

the romance for a moment. We're talking about a grown man, the most powerful ruler in the region, and a boy who was his property. That's not a love story. That's ownership. The Gosnovid court set a template that would persist for centuries. Music and dance were central to courtly entertainment, and young boys, often enslaved, often purchased from poor families, were trained as dancers and performers. They wore bells on their ankles. They dressed in flowing, feminized clothing. They performed at banquets and gatherings where powerful men drank and socialized. And when the performance was over, those boys didn't go home to their families. They went to the chambers of whoever owned them. This pattern repeated itself across dynasty after dynasty in the region.

The Timurids, the descendants of Tamerlane, who ruled Central Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries, maintained the tradition. The Mughal Empire, which grew out of that Timurid legacy and came to dominate much of South Asia, carried it forward. The Emperor Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, wrote in his memoir, The Babur Nama,

one of the most celebrated autobiographical works in world literature, about his infatuation with a boy in the bazaar of Kabul. He described his love sickness, his inability to concentrate, his obsessive thoughts about this youth, Scholars have debated the nature of that passage for centuries, but the plain text speaks for itself. Babur was a grown man, a conqueror, an emperor, and he was writing about a boy in a marketplace. I bring all of this up not to condemn any particular culture or religion.

Every civilization in human history has its dark chapters, and the exploitation of children is tragically universal. I bring it up because you can't understand modern Bacabazi, without understanding. understanding that it didn't appear out of thin air. It grew out of soil that had been tilled for centuries. By the time we reached the modern era, this practice had roots so deep that pulling them out would require tearing apart the social fabric of entire communities.

So we've established that the exploitation of boys has ancient roots across Central Asia and the broader Islamic world. But Bacha Bazi, as a distinct Afghan cultural practice, really crystallized during the 18th and 19th centuries as Afghanistan began to take shape as a recognizable political entity. During this period, Afghanistan was a patchwork of tribal territories, governed loosely by Pashtun kings and local warlords who wielded power through patronage networks. If you were a powerful man, a con, a tribal leader,

a military commander, your status wasn't just measured by your land or your weapons. It was measured by what you could display, your hospitality, the lavishness of your gatherings, the quality of your entertainment, and at the center of that entertainment increasingly were the Bacha Bazi, the dancing boys. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Here's how the system worked, and it's important to understand the mechanics because they haven't changed much in 200 years. A powerful man, let's call him a commander, because that's often what he was, would identify a boy, usually from a poor family, usually from a rural area. Sometimes the boy was an orphan. Sometimes his family owed a debt. Sometimes the family was simply so destitute that selling their

son seemed like the least terrible option among a collection of terrible options. The commander would approach the family and offer money, or protection, or the settlement of of a debt. In exchange, the boy would come to live with the commander. Once in the commander's household, the boy would be trained. He'd learn to dance. He'd learn specific movements, the graceful, swaying, almost hypnotic choreography that's characteristic of Batchabazi performances. He'd be dressed in women's clothing, silk robes, jewelry, bells on his ankles, coal around his eyes. The feminization was deliberate and total. The boy was being transformed, and, and he'd be transformed into something that existed outside the normal categories of Afghan society.

Not quite male, not quite female, but something designed specifically to be an object of desire for the men who would watch him perform. The performances themselves happened at gatherings called mephils, essentially parties hosted by powerful men. Think of them as a cross between a dinner party and a nightclub, but in a culture where women are kept strictly segregated from male social life, the men, would sit in a circle. They'd eat. They'd drink tea or something stronger, depending on the gathering. And then the music would start, and the boy would dance. Now the dancing itself,

and I want to be careful here because I don't want to reduce this to something titillating. The dancing was, by most accounts, genuinely skilled. These boys were trained extensively. The movements drew from classical Persian and Afghan dance traditions. There was real artistry involved, and that's part of what makes this so insidious, because the beauty of the performance became a veneer that covered the ugliness of what was really happening. Because here's what happened after the dancing stopped. The boy didn't just go to sleep in his own room.

The men at the gathering would compete for the boy's company. Sometimes it was a bidding war. Sometimes the boy's owner would gift his time with the boy to a favored guest as a display of generosity and hospitality. And what happened behind closed doors? Well, we don't need to spell it out, but we need to acknowledge it plainly. These boys were raped, repeatedly, by multiple men, often for years, until they grew old enough that their beards came in and they were no longer considered desirable.

At that point, they'd be discarded, replaced by a younger boy, and left to deal with the psychological wreckage of their stolen childhood on their own. The age range of these boys was typically between 10 and 18, though younger, boys weren't unheard of. The most prized boys were those on the cusp of adolescence, old enough to dance skillfully, young enough to still be beardless. When a boy began to show signs of puberty, his days as a dancing boy were numbered. Some were simply turned out. Others were married off to women, expected to seamlessly transition into the role of husband and father, despite having spent their formative years as sexual objects for other men. And here's what really

gets me. What really disturbs me as a former cop who spent years dealing with crimes against children. This was all conducted openly. It wasn't hidden. It wasn't treated as shameful. In many parts of Afghanistan, owning a dancing boy was a status symbol. It was like owning a fancy car or a thoroughbred horse. Men bragged about the beauty of their boys. They showed them off at public events. There was even a saying that became common in certain parts of the country. Women are for children, boys are for pleasure. That saying tells you everything you need to know about how deeply this practice was embedded in the culture of certain Afghan communities. It wasn't a dirty secret.

It was a social institution, and it was protected by the very people who had the power to stop it. The tribal code of Pashtun Wally, the ancient code of conduct that governs Pashtun's social life, emphasizes honor, hospitality, and the protection of guests. In theory, this code should protect the vulnerable. In practice, it was weaponized to protect the powerful men who kept dancing boys. Questioning a man's relationship with his boy was seen as an attack on his honor. And in Pashtun culture, an attack on honor could be a death sentence. So the practice persisted.

Generation after generation. Father to son. Warlord to warlord. A self-perpetuating cycle where boys who were abused sometimes grew up. up to become abusers themselves, because that was the only model of power and masculinity they'd ever known. The first time Western eyes got a good, hard look at Bacabazi was during the Anglo-Afghan wars of the 19th century, and the reaction was, complicated. British officers who served in Afghanistan during the first Anglo-Afghan War of 1839 to 1842, and the second Anglo-Afghan War of

1878 to 1880, wrote about the practice in their letters, journals, and memoirs. Some expressed horror, some expressed fascination, and some, if we're being honest, expressed both simultaneously. That peculiar Victorian blend of moral outrage and barely concealed titillation that characterized so much of the British colonial encounter with the cultures they sought to dominate. Sir Richard Francis Burton, the legendary Victorian explorer and linguist, the man who translated the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Knights into English, wrote extensively about what he called the satanic zone, a belt of latitude where he claimed pederasty was climatically and culturally endemic. His writing on the subject was ostensibly academic, but it dripped with the

kind of Orientalist exoticism that treated the sexual practices of non-Western cultures as objects of scholarly curiosity, rather than as human rights violations involving real children. Other British observers were more plainly horrified. Mount Stuart Elphinstone, who served as the first British envoy to the Afghan court in 1808, wrote about the prevalence of dancing boys in Kabul and Peshawar. He noted that the practice was deeply embedded in Afghan social life, and that attempts to suppress it would be futile without addressing the underlying social conditions that sustained it, which, if you think about it, was a remarkably modern observation for a man writing in the

early 19th century. But the British didn't just observe. In some cases, they participated, or at least looked the other way when their own local allies engaged in the practice. The great game, that decades-long strategic rivalry between the British and Russian empires for influence over Central Asia, required the British to maintain alliances with Afghan power brokers, many of whom kept dancing boys as a matter of course. Challenging these allies on their sexual exploitation of children, wasn't just culturally awkward. It was strategically inconvenient. And so, a pattern was established that would repeat itself with devastating consistency for the next two centuries.

Western powers encountering Bacabazi, expressing varying degrees of discomfort, and ultimately deciding that geopolitical interests trump the safety of Afghan boys. Sound familiar? It should. Because this is exactly the same calculation that American and NATO forces would make a century and a half later. But we'll get to that. The British colonial records from this period are valuable because they provide some of the first detailed external descriptions of how Batchabazi actually worked. Officers describe the gatherings in detail. The music, the costumes, the dancing, the atmosphere

of barely contained desire that filled the room as the boys performed. They described the competition among men to win a boy's company for the evening. They described the boys themselves. their youth, their beauty, the haunted look in their eyes that some observers noticed, but few commented on directly. One particularly chilling account comes from a British officer who attended a gathering in Kandahar in the 1870s. He described a boy of perhaps 12 or 13, dressed in silk and gold, dancing with what the officer called, remarkable grace and skill. The boy danced for hours, the officer noted, while the assembled men watched with an intensity that bordered on the predatory. When the dancing was done, the boy was led away by the host. The officer didn't

describe what happened next, but his silence was louder than words. There's another aspect of the British encounter with Bacabazi that doesn't get talked about enough, and that's the way it infected the British forces themselves. Not in the sense that British officers were participating, though some historians have suggested that isolated cases occurred, but in the sense that the prolonged exposure to the practice desensitized the occupying forces. Men who arrived in Afghanistan horrified by what they witnessed gradually came to accept it as background noise.

It became part of the landscape, like the mountains and the dust and the heat. And that normalization, that slow erosion of moral outrage, is one of the most dangerous aspects of any system. of abuse. Because once the people who have the power to stop it, accept it as just the way things are, the victims have nobody left to turn to. The British military and diplomatic records from this period also document something else that's critically important. The intersection of Bacha Bazi with the opium trade. Afghanistan's poppy fields were already producing significant quantities of opium in the 19th century, and the same warlords who controlled the opium trade often controlled

the trade in boys. The two enterprises shared supply chains, enforcement mechanisms, and clientele. A commander who grew rich from opium had the resources to acquire the most beautiful boys. And the gatherings where those boys danced were often lubricated by opium, creating an atmosphere of intoxication and disinhibition that made the abuse even more brazen. This connection between drugs and the sexual exploitation of children would persist into the modern era, becoming even more pronounced during the decades of conflict that followed. But its roots were visible even in the colonial period, and the British observers who documented it understood, even if they didn't always say so explicitly, that they were looking at two

faces of the same coin. What the British accounts also reveal is the economic dimension of Bacabazi. This wasn't just a cultural practice. It was a business. Boys were bought and sold. Their Prices varied based on their age, their appearance, and their dancing skill. A particularly beautiful boy could fetch a sum that would represent years of income for an ordinary Afghan family. Intermediaries, essentially pimps, facilitated the trade, scouting poor villages for likely candidates, and brokering deals between desperate families and wealthy buyers. It was, in every meaningful sense, a slave trade, a slave trade in children, and it operated in broad daylight.

The British also noted something that modern observers have confirmed. The practice was more prevalent in certain regions than others. The Pashtun dominated south and east of Afghanistan were the traditional heartlands of Batchabazi, particularly the provinces of Kandah, Uruzgan, and parts of what is now Helmand. The northern regions where Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras predominated, had their own versions of the pre-dhorsesons,

practice, but it was generally less formalized and less openly celebrated than in the Pashtun South. Kandahar in particular developed a reputation as the unofficial capital of Bacabazi. The city's powerful tribal leaders and military commanders competed openly for the most beautiful boys, and the Thursday night gatherings, Thursday being the eve of the Islamic Holy Day, Friday, became legendary for their extravagance and their depravity. A saying developed that even today is repeated with a mix of dark humor and genuine revulsion. Birds fly over Kandahar using only one wing. They use the other to cover their backsides. That's Afghan dark humor at its bleakest, and it tells you that even within Afghan society, the practice was recognized

as predatory and dangerous. It wasn't universally accepted, even in the communities where it was most prevalent. Many Afghans found it repulsive. Many tried to protect their sons from, it. But the power dynamics were so lopsided. The men who engaged in Bacchabazi were invariably the most powerful men in their communities, that resistance was often futile and sometimes fatal. The 20th century brought wave after wave of upheaval to Afghanistan, and each wave reshaped the landscape of Bacabazi in different ways. During the reign of King Aminullah Khan in the 1920s, there was a brief, hopeful moment when it seemed like the practice might be curtailed. Amanullah was a modernizer. He'd been inspired by Kamal Ataturk's secular reforms in Turkey,

and he pushed for sweeping changes in Afghan society, women's education, constitutional governance, and the suppression of what he considered backward cultural practices. Bacabazi was among the traditions he targeted, but Amanullah's reforms proved too radical, too fast. Conservative tribal leaders revolted, and by 1929 he was driven from power. The message was clear. Challenge the traditional prerogatives of powerful men, and you'd pay for it. Bacabazi survived the reform movement and continued to thrive. Under the relatively stable rule of King Zahir Shah, who reigned from 1933 to 1973,

Afghanistan experienced a period of modernization and relative calm. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The practice of Bacabazi was officially elit. It had been on the books as a crime for decades, but enforcement was spotty at best. In urban areas like Kabul, which was becoming increasingly cosmopolitan and Western influenced, the practice went somewhat underground. But in the rural provinces, particularly in the south and east, it continued exactly as it always had. The law was a piece of paper. The power of local

commanders was real. Then came 1978 and everything changed. The Sauer Revolution brought a communist government to power in Kabul, backed by the Soviet Union. The new regime launched ambitious social programs, land reform, literacy campaigns, women's rights initiatives that directly challenged the traditional power structures of rural Afghanistan. The tribal leaders and warlords who had maintained their authority for generations suddenly found themselves threatened by a government that wanted to redistribute their land, educate their women, and break their monopoly on local power. The result was the Mujahideen resistance,

the holy warriors who rose up to fight the communist government, and after 1979, the Soviet troops who invaded to prop it up. And here's where Bacabazi enters one of its most complex chapters. The Mujahadine commanders who led the resistance were, in many cases, the same tribal leaders and warlords who had traditionally kept dancing boys. The war didn't eliminate the practice. It amplified it. In the chaos of conflict with millions of refugees and orphans,

the supply of vulnerable boys increased dramatically. Commander who controlled territory controlled everything in that territory, including the boys. And because the Mujahideen were fighting a holy war, a jihad against godless communists, they enjoyed a moral authority that made questioning their personal behavior virtually impossible. The Soviet occupation, from 1979 to 1990, 1989 was a decade of almost unimaginable destruction.

Over a million Afghans were killed. Five million became refugees. The social fabric of the country was shredded. Villages were bombed. Families were scattered. Children were orphaned in staggering numbers. And those orphaned, displaced, unprotected children, became prime targets for the practice of Bacabazi.

The refugee camps in Pakistan, which housed millions of Afghans throughout the 1980, became breeding grounds for the exploitation of boys. Packed into overcrowded camps with no education, no employment, and no hope. Families were desperate, and desperate families made easy targets for the procurers who trolled the camps looking for boys to buy. Meanwhile, inside Afghanistan, the Mujahideen commanders, funded and armed by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, ran their territories like personal fiefdoms. The CIA was pumping billions of... of dollars into the resistance, and some of that money filtered down to commanders who used their

power and resources to acquire dancing boys. The Americans knew about the practice. They couldn't have not known. But the Cold War calculus was simple. The enemy of our enemy was our friend, and if our friends happened to rape children, well, that was a cultural matter, best left alone. I want you to sit with that for a moment, because this is a pattern that's going to repeat itself, and I want you to recognize it when it comes back around. The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 didn't bring peace. It brought civil war. The various Mujahideen factions united only by their opposition to the Soviets, turned on each other.

The result was a period of anarchy and warlordism that made the previous decade look almost orderly by comparison. From 1992 to 1996, Afghanistan was carved up among rival commanders who fought pitched battles for control of territory, trade routes, and yes, boys. This was the era of the warlords, men like Abdul Rashid Dostam, Gulbudin Hekmatyar, and Ahmad Shah Masoud, who commanded private armies and ruled their territories with absolute authority. And in many of these territories, Batchabazi flourished as never before. The civil war had created a generation of orphans and displaced children.

The economy had collapsed. There was no functioning government, No police force, no judicial system. The only law was the law of the gun, and the men with the guns did as they pleased. Accounts from this period are particularly harrowing. Human rights organizations documented cases of boys being kidnapped off the streets. Of boys being raped by multiple commanders as spoils of war. Of boys being traded between factions as bargaining chips and ceasefire negotiations.

The exploitation was so brazen, so widespread, and so violent that it became one of the driving grievances that fueled the rise of the Taliban. And that brings us to one of the most fascinating and troubling chapters in this entire story. The Taliban emerged in 1994 from the Madrasas, the Islamic religious schools, of southern Afghanistan and the Pakistani border region. Their founding narrative was, in part, a reaction to the excesses of the warlord era, and the story they told about their own origins is, directly connected to Batchabazi. According to the founding mythology of the Taliban,

and there's enough documentary evidence to suggest it's at least partly true, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the movement's enigmatic one-eyed leader, was motivated to take up arms after two local Mujahideen commanders fought over a boy. The story goes that both commanders had kidnapped a boy, and their dispute over the child escalated into an armed confrontation that terrorized the local population. Mullah Omar, then a minor religious figure in the Kandahar area gathered a small group of religious students. Taliban literally means students and intervened. They freed the boy, punish the commanders, and in doing so, sparked a movement that would sweep across Afghanistan in a matter of months. Whether this specific

story is entirely accurate or has been embellished over time is debatable. But the kernel of truth it contains is significant. The Taliban rose to power in part because, ordinary Afghans were sick of the warlords and sick of the abuses they perpetrated, including, perhaps especially, the abuse of boys. Once in power, the Taliban made the prohibition of Bacabazi a centerpiece of their social agenda. Under their harsh interpretation of Sharia law, homosexuality was punishable by death, typically by toppling a wall onto the accused. And because the Taliban classified Bacha Bazi as a form of homosexuality, the practice

was driven underground for the first time in living memory. Now, I need to be careful here, because it would be easy to frame this as a simple good news story. The Taliban banned Batchabazi. Problem solved. But nothing about the Taliban was that simple, and their relationship with the practice was far more complicated than their public proclamation suggested. First, the ban was enforced unevenly. In the Taliban's stronghold of Kandahar, ironically the traditional heart of the traditional heartland of Bacabazi. Enforcement was relatively strict, but in other parts of the

country, particularly in areas where the Taliban's control was more tenuous. The practice continued, sometimes with the tacit knowledge of local Taliban commanders. Power has a way of corrupting even the most rigid ideologues, and there were Taliban commanders who practiced the very thing their movement claimed to have eradicated. Second, the Taliban's crackdown on Bacchabazi wasn't motivated by a concern for children's rights. It was motivated by a theological obsession with sexual purity and gender segregation. The same regime that banned dancing boys also banned girls from attending school, forced women into burkas, prohibited music, outlawed kite flying, and destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. Their concern wasn't the welfare of boys. It was the

enforcement of their interpretation of God's law. The boys were incidental beneficiary. of a broader program of religious authoritarianism. Third, and this is the most disturbing part, some former Taliban fighters have acknowledged that sexual abuse of boys occurred within the movement itself. The madrasas where many Taliban recruits were educated were in some cases, environments where older students and instructors abused younger boys. The very institution that produced the Taliban's foot soldiers

was in some instances perpetuating the abuse the Taliban claim to oppose. But despite all these caveats, there's no denying that the Taliban era, roughly 1996 to 2001, represented the most significant suppression of Batchabazi in modern Afghan history. The practice didn't disappear, but it went further underground than it had been in centuries. For a brief, complicated moment, the Dancing Boys of Afghanistan had something resembling a reprieve. And then, on September 11th, 2001, everything changed again. The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, and within weeks, the Taliban regime collapsed. American Special Forces and CIA operatives, working alongside the Afghan

Northern Alliance, a coalition of warlords who had been fighting the Taliban for years, swept across the country. The Taliban melted away into the mountains and across the border into Pakistan. A new government was established in Kabul under Hamid Karzai. The era of warlords was back, and with the warlords came Bacabazi, roaring back like a wildfire after a drought. The commanders who allied with the Americans to topple the Taliban were, in many cases, the same men who had practiced Bacabazi before the Taliban banned it. Men like Abdul Rashid Dostam, the Uzbek warlord from the north,

who was accused of keeping harms of young boys. Men like local police chiefs and provincial governors, who had risen to power through the American-backed system and who used their authority and the impunity that came with being an American ally to resume the practice with enthusiasm. The speed of Bacha Bazi's resurgence after the Taliban's fall was breathtaking.

Within months of the American invasion, reports were surfacing of dancing boy gatherings in Kandahar, Mazari Sharif, Kunduz, and other cities. Human rights organizations sounded the alarm almost immediately, but their warnings were drowned out by the noise of the war on terror. Here's where the story gets really ugly for the United States,

and I say this as a former law enforcement officer who has the deepest respect for our military personnel. The men and women who served in Afghanistan were overwhelmingly good people doing an impossible job. What I'm about to tell you isn't a reflection on them. It's a reflection on the policies and decisions made by people far above their pay grade. American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan began reporting the sexual abuse of boys almost from the beginning of the occupation. Soldiers at forward operating bases in southern and eastern Afghanistan described hearing boys screaming at night in the compounds of Afghan commanders, the same commanders who were supposed to be America's allies in the fight against the Taliban.

Some soldiers described seeing boys chained to beds. Others described Afghan police commanders openly keeping boys on their base, dressing them in women's clothing and parading them in front of American servicemen. And when these soldiers reported what they'd seen and heard to their superiors, they were told to look the other way. This wasn't informal advice. It wasn't a wink and a nod. In many cases, it was a direct order. American soldiers were instructed that Bacabazi was a cultural practice,

and that interfering with it would damage relationships with Afghan allies. The official policy, though it was never committed to paper in quite these terms, was essentially, ignore it. It's their culture. We need these people. Think about that for a moment. American servicemen and women, people who had sworn an oath to protect the innocent and uphold justice, were ordered to stand by while children were raped by men who were drawing American paychecks and using American weapons. The moral injury inflicted on those soldiers is incalculable. And the message sent to the boys of Afghanistan was unmistakable. No one is coming to help you.

Not even the most powerful military in the world. The story of Sergeant First Class Charles Martlin became the most public example of this moral catastrophe. In 2011, Martlin was serving in Kunduz province when he learned that an Afghan local police commander had kidnapped a boy, chained him to a bed, and repeatedly raped him. When the boy's mother came to the American base to plead for help, Martlin and his team leader, Captain Dan Quinn, confronted the Afghan commander.

When the commander laughed off their concerns, literally laughed. Martlin physically threw him off the base. For this act, for defending a child from his rapist, Martlin was punished. He was stripped of a favorable assignment and eventually forced out of the special forces. The army initiated proceedings to discharge him from the military entirely. It took a public outcry, media attention, and the intervention of members of members of of Congress to save his career. Captain Quinn's fate was even worse. Quinn had been an outstanding officer with a stellar record. After the incident in Kunduz, he was relieved of his command and forced to leave the army. His career was destroyed, not because he had failed in his duty, but because he had

fulfilled it. He had protected a child, and for that, the system punished him. The Martland and Quinn cases weren't isolated incidents. They were just the ones that made the news. Across Afghanistan for more than a decade, American soldiers encountered Bacabazi and were told to do nothing. Some obeyed, some didn't. Those who didn't often paid a professional price. Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr. didn't get the chance to fight the system. The young Marine was stationed at a base in Helmand Province in 2012 when he began hearing boys screaming at night from the Afghan police compound adjacent to his post. He called his father back home in New York and told him what was happening.

happening. His father later recalled that his son was deeply disturbed by what he was hearing and frustrated by the orders not to intervene. At night, we can hear them screaming, Gregory told his father, but we're not allowed to do anything about it. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. On August 10th, 2012, Lance Corporal Buckley was shot and killed, along with two other Marines by one of the Afghan police officers on the base. He was 21 years old. He was 21 years old. The investigation into the shooting revealed a web of corruption, drug abuse, and child exploitation at the Afghan police compound. The boys whose screams Buckley had heard at night were real. The abuse was real. And the system that told American service members to ignore it had in this case contributed to an environment so toxic that it got three Marines killed.

Gregory Buckley, Sr. spent years seeking answers about his son's death and the culture of willful blind. that surrounded it. His advocacy helped bring the issue of Bacabazi to public attention in the United States, but no amount of attention could bring his son back, and no policy change could undo the damage done to the countless boys whose screams echoed through the Afghan night, while American soldiers lay in their bunks and tried not to listen. There were other cases that never made headlines. Soldiers who reported abuse through their chain of command and were told the reports had been noted, bureaucratic language for filed and forgotten. Intelligence analysts who flagged Bacabazi as a security risk, arguing correctly

that the practice created resentment toward the government and drove recruits to the Taliban, and were overruled by superiors who considered the political relationship with Afghan commanders more important. Military lawyers who quietly pointed out that the U.S. was potentially in violation of the Lehi law, which prohibits American military assistance to foreign security forces, credibly accused of gross human rights violations, and were told not to press the issue. And the boys? The boys kept dancing, kept being sold, kept being raped, under the protection of men who were nominally America's partners in building a free and democratic Afghanistan. The irony is enough to make you sick. Let's slow down for a moment and look at the mechanics

of how Batchabazi operates in the modern era, because understanding the system is essential to understanding why it's so hard to eradicate. The process typically begins with recruitment, and recruitment is a generous term for what's actually happening. In most cases, boys are identified by their future owners or by intermediaries who function as talent scouts, scouts for human trafficking, essentially. These intermediaries are often men who were themselves former dancing boys, which tells you something about the cyclical nature of this abuse. The boys they target share certain characteristics. They're almost always from impoverished families.

They often come from rural areas where educational opportunities are non-existent. They may be orphans or half-orphins, boys who've lost fathers to war or conflict. They're chosen for their appearance. Light skin, fine features, and a graceful build are prized. In a culture where beauty standards for these boys are well-established and widely known, The selection process is disturbingly systematic. Once a boy is identified, the approach to the family follows a predictable pattern. The buyer or his intermediary offers money.

Sometimes it's a lump sum. Sometimes it's a monthly stipend. Sometimes it's framed as an employment opportunity. The boy will work as a household servant or tea boy, earning money that will be sent home to support his family. The sexual component is rarely discussed openly with the family, though in many cases the family understands perfectly well what's really happening. They're just too desperate or too powerless to say no.

In some cases, there's no negotiation at all. Boys are simply taken, kidnapped from markets, from roads, from fields where they're tending livestock. In the lawless provinces of southern Afghanistan, where armed commanders operate with near total impunity, abduction is a common recruitment method. A boy disappears, and his family, has no recourse. The man who took him is too powerful to challenge and there's no

police force or court system that can help. Once acquired the boy enters a period of training. He's taught to dance the traditional Batchabazi dance style with its spinning its hip movements its deliberate sensuality. He's taught to sing. He's taught to serve tea and attend to the needs of his owner and his owner's guests. He's dressed in women's clothing and makeup. His eyebrows are shaped. His skin is treated with creams and lotions. The transformation is comprehensive. The boy is being remade into an object of desire, and every aspect of his appearance and behavior is calibrated to serve that purpose. The dancing itself takes place at gatherings

that range from small private affairs to large elaborate parties attended by dozens or even hundreds of men. The most prestigious gatherings feature multiple boys, competing for the attention and approval of the assembled guests. The atmosphere has been described by observers as charged with sexual tension. Men watching the boys dance with an intensity that makes no pretense of being purely aesthetic. At these gatherings, the boys perform a specific role. They dance. They serve food and drinks.

They sit with the guests, allowing themselves to be touched, embraced, fondled. And at the end of the evening, the sexual dimension of the transaction is completed. Sometimes the boy goes with his owner. Sometimes he's offered to a guest. Sometimes he's auctioned, informally, but unmistakably, to the highest bidder. The financial dimensions of Bacabazi are significant. Owning a dancing boy is expensive. The initial purchase price, the cost of clothing and grooming,

the expense of hosting gatherings, it all adds up. But for the men involved, the expenditure is an investment in social capital. A beautiful skilled dancing boy enhances his owner's prestige. He's proof of wealth and power. He's a living trophy. And for the intermediaries and procurers, Bacabazi is a profitable business. Some operate networks that span multiple provinces, identifying and acquiring boys in one region,

and selling them to buyers in another. These networks overlap with other forms of trafficking and organized crime, creating a web of exploitation that's deeply entrenched, in the informal economy of rural Afghanistan. In the modern era, technology has added new dimensions to the practice. Cell phones and social media have made it easier for procurers to identify and contact potential victims. Videos of dancing boys circulate on Afghan social media platforms, serving as both entertainment and advertisement.

Some commanders display their boys on social media the way a person might show off a luxury purchase. proudly, publicly, without any awareness that what they're displaying is evidence of a crime. The gatherings themselves have evolved too. While traditional methills still occur, some Bacabazi events have taken on a more commercial character, resembling underground clubs or shows where admission is charged and boys are available for hire by the hour. In the larger cities, the practice has partially merged with the sex trade, with older boys and young men who aged out of the dancing, boy system transitioning into prostitution, another layer of exploitation built on top of the

original abuse. Perhaps most disturbingly, the practice of Bacabazi has influenced Afghanistan's broader culture of child exploitation in ways that extend beyond the traditional dancing boy framework. The normalization of sexual access to boys has created a permissive environment where other forms of child abuse, exploitation of street children, abuse in orphanages and schools, and schools, schools, trafficking of minors for labor and sex, flourish with minimal accountability. Bacabazi isn't just a practice. It's a symptom of a much larger failure to protect children, and its cultural acceptance has lowered the threshold for all forms of child exploitation. The boys themselves are trapped. They're separated from their families, often by hundreds of miles.

They have no education, no money, and no independent means of survival. If they try to run, They're caught and beaten, or worse. If they appeal to the authorities, the authorities are often complicit. The police chief who should be protecting them may himself be a practitioner of Bacabazi. The cycle is almost impossible to escape, and when a boy ages out, when his beard comes in and he's no longer desirable, he's cast aside. Some are married off to women and expected to assume a traditional male role in society, despite years of sexual abuse that have left them psychologically shattered. Some become drug addicts, self-medicating with the opium that's cheap and plentiful in Afghanistan.

Some become procurers themselves, perpetuating the cycle by recruiting the next generation of boys. And some simply don't survive. Suicide among former dancing boys is a known but poorly documented phenomenon. The psychological toll on these boys is devastating. Studies by organizations like the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission have documented the long-term effects. Post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, difficulty forming healthy relationships, confusion about sexual identity, and a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness. These boys carry their trauma for life, and the culture that inflicted it on them offers them no support, no therapy, no path to healing.

The international community's response to Bacabazi has been, to put it charitably, inadequate. To put it less charitably, it's been a case study in how geopolitical interests consistently override the protection of children. International human rights organizations, groups like Human Rights Watch, UNICEF, and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, have documented the practice extensively. Reports have been written. Press conferences have been held. recommendations have been issued, and very little has changed. The problem isn't a lack of information. The problem is a lack of will.

During the American occupation, which lasted from 2001 to 2021, the United States poured trillions of dollars into Afghanistan. Billions were spent on building the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, institutions that were shot through with Batchabazi practitioners. American taxpayer dollars were quite literally funding the sexual exploitation of Afghan boys. The Pentagon was aware of this. The State Department was aware of this. And the institutional response was to treat it as an intractable cultural issue

that wasn't America's problem to solve. When pressed by journalists and human rights advocates, officials would point to Afghan laws that technically criminalized the practice. They'd note that the Afghan government had signed international, national conventions on children's rights. They'd express concern and sympathy. And then, they'd change the subject. In 2015, the New York Times published a devastating investigative report

that brought the issue to mainstream American attention for the first time. The article documented cases of American soldiers being disciplined for intervening to protect boys from their Afghan allies. It quoted soldiers who described the policy of willful blindness as a moral violation of everything they'd been taught about duty and honor. The story prompted congressional hearings and bipartisan outrage, but no fundamental change in policy. The Afghan government itself was both perpetrator and would-be reformer, depending on which part of the government you were talking to. In Kabul, officials passed laws and issued decrees against Bacazi. The practice was formally

criminalized, and agencies were established to address child protection. But in the provinces, where the real power lay. These laws were dead letters. Provincial governors, police chiefs, and military commanders practiced Batchabazi openly, and the central government lacked either the ability or the will to stop them. President Hamid Karzai, who governed from 2001 to 2014,

was personally opposed to the practice, but politically dependent on the very warlords and commanders who perpetuated it. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, was similarly constrained. The Afghan political system was built on patronage networks that ran through the hands of men who kept dancing boys. And challenging those men meant risking the collapse of the governing coalition. It's a hellish calculus.

Do you confront the police commander in Uruzgan who's raping a 12-year-old boy, knowing that he's also the only thing standing between the provincial capital and the Taliban? Do you arrest the militia leader in Kunduz who keeps three dancing boys, knowing that his fighters are essential to holding the highway? The people who made these decisions chose security over justice every single time, and the boys paid the price. In August 2021, the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, and the Taliban swept back to power with stunning speed. The Afghan government collapsed, the army dissolved, the warlords who had ruled the provinces

either fled or cut deals with the incoming regime. And once again, the landscape for Batchabazi shifted. The Taliban's second incarnation has, like the first, publicly condemned Bacabazi and proclaimed its intention to eradicate the practice. There have been reports of Taliban commanders punishing men found to be keeping dancing boys, in some cases with imprisonment and others with execution. The movement's spokesmen have invoked their original founding story, reminding the world that opposition to Bacabazi was part of the Taliban's reason for existence. But the situation on the ground is murky. Reports from inside Afghanistan suggest that, as in the first Taliban era, enforcement of the ban is inconsistent.

Some Taliban commanders are genuinely committed to ending the practice. Others are engaged in it themselves. The movement is not monolithic, and the local dynamics of power, tribe, and personality that have always shaped the practice of Bacabazi, continue to do so under the new regime. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. What has changed is the environment. The economic collapse that followed the American withdrawal

has plunged Afghanistan into a humanitarian crisis of staggering proportions. Millions of people are food insecure. The economy has contracted dramatically. Families that were already poor have been pushed into destitution. And destitution, as we've established, is the soil in which Batchabazi takes root. Early reports suggest that the economic crisis is driving an increase in child exploitation, even as the Taliban officially cracks down. When a family can't feed their children, the offer of money for a son becomes almost impossible

to refuse, regardless of what everyone knows will happen to that son. The Taliban may have the theological will to suppress Bacabazi, but whether they have the institutional capacity to do so in the midst of an economic catastrophe remains an open question. And the international community, the organizations that documented the practice for decades. They've largely been expelled from Afghanistan. The human rights workers, the journalists, the NGO staff who bore witness to the suffering of these boys. Most of them are gone. The window through which the outside world could see what was happening has been shuttered. Whatever is happening to the dancing boys of Afghanistan right now, it's happening in the dark.

What we do know from the limited reporting that has emerged from inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan paints a contradictory picture. In some provinces, the Taliban has made genuine efforts to suppress Bacabazi. Former dancing boys have been released from the households of commanders who fled or were captured. Public punishments of men found engaging in the practice have been reported. Floggings, imprisonment, and in at least a few cases, execution. The Taliban's ministry for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice, the same body that enforces dress codes and bands music and restricts women's movement, has included Batchabazi in its portfolio of social evils to be eliminated.

But in other provinces, the picture is very different. Reports have surfaced of Taliban fighters, the very men tasked with enforcing the movement's moral code, keeping boys of their own. In some areas, the practice has simply gone deeper, underground. The gatherings becoming smaller and more secretive. The boys more carefully hidden from the religious police. The commanders who practice Bacabazi before the Taliban's return didn't suddenly lose their desire for boys just

because the political winds shifted. They adapted. They found ways to continue. And then there's the refugee crisis. Millions of Afghans have fled the country since the Taliban's return, pouring into Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and beyond. These refugee populations, desperate, impoverished, stateless, represent exactly the kind of vulnerable community where child exploitation thrives. Reports from refugee communities in Pakistan have documented cases of Afghan boys being sold or exploited. The practice of Batchabazi traveling with the diaspora, metastasizing in new environments where oversight is minimal and desperation is high. The international community has largely moved on. Afghanistan is yesterday's news.

The world's attention has shifted to other crises, other conflicts, other tragedies. And in the vacuum of that inattention, the dancing boys continue to dance. Before we close this episode, I want to spend some time on the boys themselves. Because in all the talk of history and politics and geopolitics, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that we're talking about individual human beings, children who had names and faces and dreams and families. children who deserved better than what they got. Their stories, when they're told at all,

follow heartbreakingly similar patterns. There's the story of a boy from Takar province. I'll call him Ahmad, because his real name could put him in danger, who was sold to a local commander when he was 11. His father had been killed in the fighting, and his mother, desperate to feed her remaining children, accepted the commander's offer. Ahmad spent four years as a dancing boy.

He was passed between multiple men, raped repeatedly, and beaten when he resisted. When he turned 15 and began to grow facial hair, he was discarded. He ended up on the streets of Kunduz, addicted to opium, selling his body to survive. He was 17 when a human rights worker found him and helped him enter a rehabilitation program. Ahmad's story isn't unusual. It's typical. There's the story of a boy from Kandahar who was kidnapped from a market when he was 10. His family searched for him for months before learning that he'd been taken by a powerful tribal leader. They appealed to the police, who told them there was nothing they could do.

The boy spent three years in the man's household before escaping during a Taliban attack. He made his way to Kabul, where he lived on the streets until he was taken in by a shelter, run by an international organization. He was 13 and had the psychological profile of a combat veteran. And there's the story of a boy from Baglan, province, who was offered to a commander by his own uncle. The uncle owed the commander a debt, and the boy was the payment. The boy was 12. He spent two years dancing and being sexually abused before the commander tired of him and gave him to a subordinate. The cycle continued for another three years before the boy managed to flee to Pakistan, where he lived as a refugee

and gradually rebuilt some semblance of a normal life, though the scars, both physical and psychological, never fully healed. These stories represent a fraction of the total. The true number of boys affected by Bacabazi is unknown and probably unknowable. Estimates vary widely. Tens of thousands, certainly. Possibly hundreds of thousands over the decades. Each one a human being.

Each one, somebody's son. What happens to these boys when they age out of the system? The outcomes are grim. Some, as I've mentioned, become procurers themselves. damaged men who perpetuate the cycle because it's the only world they know. Some marry and attempt to lead normal lives, but the trauma manifests in domestic violence, substance abuse, and an inability to form healthy emotional bonds.

Some turn to crime. Some turn to the Taliban or other militant groups, seeking in the rigid structure of an armed movement the stability and identity that were stolen from them. And some don't make it at all. The suicide rate among former dancing boys, while not reliably quantified, is believed to be high. The shame, the trauma, the sense of worthlessness. It's a weight that some boys simply can't carry. They end their lives quietly,

unremarked upon, un mourned by anyone except the families who lost them twice, once to the men who bought them, and once to the grave. There's one more dimension of the survivor experience that needs to be addressed, because it speaks to how thoroughly Batchabazi warps the lives it touches. Many former dancing boys struggle profoundly with their sense of identity. In a culture where masculinity is rigidly defined, where a man is expected to be strong, dominant, and unquestionably heterosexual, these boys have been forced into a feminized role for years. They've worn women's clothing. They've been sexually penetrated by men. They've been treated as objects. And when they emerge from the system, they're expected to snap back into conventional manhood,

as if nothing happened. The psychological whiplash is devastating. Some former dancing boys described feeling permanently caught between identities, neither fully male in the way their culture demands, nor the feminized creature they were forced to become. Some develop what psychologists would recognize as dissociative disorders, mentally separating themselves from the experiences they endured. Others internalize the shame so deeply that they become violent, toward themselves, toward their wives, toward their own children, as they attempt to reassert a masculinity that was stolen from them before they even understood what it meant.

The lucky ones, and lucky, is a relative term in this context. Find their way to the handful of organizations that provide support to survivors. groups like the Afghan child education and care organization, War Child, and various small locally run shelters have tried to create safe spaces for former dancing boys. But the resources are minuscule compared to the scale of the problem. For every boy who receives help, dozens more are left to navigate their trauma alone, in a society that would prefer to pretend they don't exist. And here's something that haunts me. Among the former dancing boys who've shared their stories with researchers and journalists,

a common theme emerges, the sense that they are permanently marked. Damaged goods is how one survivor described himself. Not in those exact words he spoke in Pashto through a translator, but that was the meaning. He believed at the core of his being that what had been done to him had ruined him, not temporarily, not in a way that could be fixed, permanently. irreversibly. He was 23 years old when he said this. He'd been a dancing boy from age 11 to age 15, and at 23, he already considered his life over. 23 years old, and his life was already over.

Let that sit with you. So why has Bacabazi proven so resistant to eradication? Why, despite laws, despite international attention, despite the efforts of human rights organizations, does the practice persist. The answer is complex, but it boils down to a few interrelated factors. First, there's the issue of power. Bacabazi is practiced by powerful men, the very men who control the police, the courts, the military, and the government in their regions. Asking these men to enforce laws against themselves is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. It doesn't work. And when the central government lacks the capacity or the will to project its authority into the provinces, These local power brokers operate with impunity.

Then there's the issue of poverty. The raw material of Bacabazi is desperate families and vulnerable boys. As long as Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries on earth, there will be families willing or forced to surrender their sons. Economic development, education, and the creation of alternative livelihoods are essential to addressing the supply side of the equation. But these are long-term solutions in a country that's lurching from crisis to crisis for decades. There's also the issue of gender segregation.

In a society where women are strictly segregated from male social life, the absence of women from public spaces creates a vacuum that boys are forced to fill. This isn't to say that the presence of women would eliminate the sexual exploitation of boys. The problem is far more complex than that. But the extreme gender segregation that characterizes Afghan society, particularly in rural areas is undeniably a contributing factor. Then there's the issue of impunity. Men who practice Bacabazi are almost never held accountable. When cases do reach the courts, the perpetrators are often released after paying a bribe. In some cases, it's the boys themselves who are prosecuted, charged with sodomy or moral crimes while their abusers walk free. The criminal justice system,

such as it is, is stacked against the victims at every level. There's the unfortunate, cyclical nature of the abuse. Boys who are victimized grow up to become men who victimize. Not all of them, certainly. Many survivors break the cycle, but enough perpetuate it to ensure that the practice is renewed with each generation. Breaking this cycle requires not just law enforcement, but comprehensive psychological support for survivors, support that barely exists in Afghanistan. And finally, and this is perhaps the most uncomfortable factor to confront. There's the issue of cultural normalization. In the communities where Bacabazi is most prevalent, it's been practiced for so long that many people have simply accepted it as a normal part of life.

It's the way things are. It's what powerful men do. Challenging it means challenging the entire social order, and that's a step that few people in a deeply traditional hierarchical society are willing or able to take. None of these factors exist in isolation. They interact and reinforce each other, creating a system that is extraordinarily resilient. Addressing Bacabazi requires addressing all of them simultaneously, a task that would be daunting even in a stable, wealthy society, and that is nearly impossible in a country as troubled as Afghanistan. So why did I spend this episode telling you about the dancing boys of Afghanistan? Why does this belong on disturbing history? Because history isn't just about dates and battles

and the rise and fall of empires. History is about people. It's about what we do to each other and what we allow to be done. And the story of Bacabazi is one of the most damning indictments of human complicity in the suffering of children that history has to offer.

I've sat with this material for weeks now, and I keep coming back to one thing. It's not the brutality of individual acts, though those are horrific. It's the architecture of complicity. The sheer number of people, who know about this practice, who've known about it for centuries, and who've done nothing. The poets who romanticized it. The kings who practiced it. The colonial officers who documented it and

moved on. The Cold War strategists who funded the men who perpetuated it. The generals who ordered their troops to ignore it. The diplomats who treated it as a cultural footnote. The journalists who wrote about it sparked a brief moment of outrage and watched as the world's attention drifted to the next headline. Every generation has had the knowledge necessary to act. Every generation has found a reason not to. And let's not pretend this is purely an Afghan problem or a Central Asian problem or a developing world problem. The exploitation of children by powerful men is a human problem. We've seen it in the Catholic Church. We've seen it in Hollywood. We've seen it in the Boy Scouts of America. We've seen it in British boarding schools and Australian

orphanages and Olympic gymnastics programs. Wherever power exists without accountability, children are at risk. Afghanistan's version is more visible, more formalized, and more deeply rooted than most. But the underlying dynamics, the abuse of power, the silencing of victims, the complicity of institutions, are universal. This isn't a problem that exists in some distant, disconnected world. American soldiers witnessed it. American tax dollars funded the men who practiced it. American policy, deliberate, conscious policy,

protected the perpetrators and punished the soldiers who tried to intervene. This is our history, too. We are implicated. And beyond the American dimension, the story of Bacabazi raises questions that resonate far beyond Afghanistan. How do cultural practices become shields for abuse? How do power structures perpetuate the exploitation of the vulnerable? How does societies look the other way when confronting a problem means challenging the people in charge?

These aren't Afghan questions. They're human questions. And we'd better be willing to ask them, because the answers affect us all. I started this episode by saying that sometimes we disturb history to find the truth, and sometimes history disturbs us. Tonight, I think we got both. We disturbed a history that powerful people have won. worked hard to keep buried. And in the process, we found truths that disturb us to our core.

The boys are still out there. In Kandahar and Kunduz, in Uruzgan and Baiglan, in the provinces and the cities and the refugee camps. Some of them are dancing right now as you listen to this. Some of them are being sold right now. Some of them are being raped right now. And the world, by and large, isn't watching. But we're watching. Or at least tonight, we were listening. And maybe that's a start. Maybe bearing witness is the first step towards something better. I don't know. I honestly don't know. What I know is that these boys deserve to have their story told, fully and honestly, without flinching. And that's what we've tried to do tonight. If this episode affected you, and I'd be worried if it didn't, I'd ask you to do something. Learn more.

The documentaries The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan by journalist Najibullah Kariashi and the PBS Frontline Report on the subject are essential viewing. The investigative reporting by the New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg, and Joseph Goldstein brought this issue to mainstream attention. The work of organizations like UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission provides detailed documentation and ongoing advocacy. And if you're in a position to support organizations that work with exploited children in Afghanistan and around the world, please do. Because these boys can't fight for themselves.

They never could. That's the whole point of this story. They were chosen precisely because they couldn't fight back. The least we can do is fight for them. This has been disturbing history. Take care of each other out there. And for God's sake, take care of the children. This episode of disturbing history was researched and written with the intention of raising awareness

about a practice that affects thousands of children. The accounts and historical details presented are based on documented sources including academic research, investigative journalism, human rights reports, and historical texts. Names of victims have been changed or withheld to protect their identities. If you or someone you know is affected by child exploitation, contact the national Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1,8008435678, or the Child Help National Child Abuse Hotline at 1,80042244453.