Bacha Bazi - Media Coverage

Media Coverage

Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi made a documentary film titled The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan about the practice, which was shown in the U.K. in March, 2010 and aired in the U.S. the following month. Journalist Nicholas Graham of The Huffington Post lauded the documentary as "both fascinating and horrifying."

The issue has been covered by RAWA, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. The practice of bacha bazi prompted the US Defense Department to hire social scientist AnnaMaria Cardinalli to investigate the problem, as Western soldiers on patrol often passed older men walking hand-in-hand with pretty young boys. British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to "touch and fondle them," which the soldiers didn't understand.

In the novel The Kite Runner, and in the movie of the same name, the practice of bacha bazi is depicted. In the plot, the protagonist's half-nephew is forced to become a dancing boy and sexual slave to a high-ranking official of the Taliban government, who also had, years earlier, raped the boy's father when both were young teenagers.

In December 2010 a cable made public by WikiLeaks revealed that foreign contractors from DynCorp had spent money on bacha bazi in northern Afghanistan. Afghan interior minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar requested that the US military assume control over DynCorp training centers in response, but the US embassy claimed that this was not "legally possible under the DynCorp contract".