Shocking: American soldiers have recounted their surprise at seeing grown men walking down the street with young boys. If he’s still alive he would be about 18 now.' 'In the end he ran away, and he moved around a lot so they wouldn’t find him. 'He started taking heroin to help him cope, but he was still being taken to the parties. 'There was one particular boy I remember, called Faraidoon, who was about 13 when I first met him, who was taken and used in the parties,'Ali Batoor told MailOnline. Yet for the boys, more than two fifths of whom are between the age of 13 and 15, being chosen as a bacha bareesh - man without a beard - it is a life sentence, one which will see them cast out of their families and shunned by society. You have to spend a lot of money to pay the boys, feed the boys, keep them clothed. 'When the boys are beautiful it shows they are powerful, but also the number. 'A war lord has many - they keep maybe 10 boys, all together,' Dr Sobhrang told MailOnline. In Afghanistan, however, the perpetrators have been protected by the police, scared to upset the powerful warlords and businessmen. In any other country, it would be considered paedophilia.
It is said one of the country's favourite sayings is women are for children, boys are for pleasure. 'They have sex with their masters and then at the parties they are abused by different people.' 'But they live as though they are in a relationship with their masters, so their masters keep them, house them and buy them food and things. 'The boys don’t earn anything from the parties,' explained photographer Barat Ali Batoor, who spent months winning the boys' trust and documenting their lives, Then the boys are passed between the men, taken to hotel rooms where they can be sexually abused.
Once the party is over, and the dancing has finished, the true horror of their role is revealed. 'Oh boy, you have set your lover on fire.' 'Where do you live, so I can get to know your father. 'He's touching the boy with his cotton clothes,' a musician sang on the 2009 documentary, The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan. They command the attention of the room as they move to the traditional songs, with words which do more than hint at what is to come. These promises more often than not come to nothing: instead, the boys are trained as dancers, made to perform to groups of men dressed as girls, bells on their flowing skirts and make up on the faces. It makes it easy for predators to prowl the streets targeting 'pretty' young boys, enticing them from their families with promises of work or education. Afghanistan's poverty has been a driving force in the rise of bacha bazi in the last 15 years.