14 January 2013, Dhaka, BangladeshI am standing on the sixth-floor balcony of a building overlooking Dhaka city. I have lived in the capital of Bangladesh since early 2010. It is nearly time to go home.Dhaka rumbles on below me. Concrete tower blocks stretch as far as the eye can see. Slums litter the landscape. The contrast between poverty and excess is exemplified by skyscrapers perching at the edge of slums. Space is at a premium; millions of people are packed into this city like sardines in a can, all trying their best to navigate its chaos and survive. The poor and the rich live side by side; four-wheel-drive cars zoom past men with no limbs. Middle-class children stream out of school while their poor counterparts sit on the roadside scuffing dirt with bare feet.The air is filled with a cacophony of noise: car horns, buses, rickshaw bells, people shouting and endless banging from building sites. The city is on the move. Thousands of people fill the streets, scurrying to cross roads, buying food at local markets or drinking chai from tea stalls. Rickshaws collide in a fight to snap up the next passenger; buses career down roads with men clinging to the sides or perching precariously on the rooftops. Cars drive though gaps which seem impossibly small, honking their horns as they move.I can see a spectrum of grey, light brown and yellow as the sun glistens through the smog. Yet peopleās clothes enliven the scene. Pinks of saris flash past, bright blue lungis1 cover menās legs. In the distance, one of the few parks in Dhaka provides an oasis of green in this metropolis of concrete and dirt.For three years, I have immersed myself in this city and this country. It has been the location for my research, but it has also been much more. Dhaka and its people have taught me more than I could have imagined of life and death, of joy and happiness and of pain and suffering.The faces of my participants will stay with me foreverāfrom the colleagues who have become my friends to the police officers I met behind closed doors to protect their anonymity. But it is the street children who personify this research and the 22 young people who embody my argument. Yet many others have added to my understanding and will remain forever nameless, consumed back into the orifice of the city. They are the children who stand shoeless on street corners and grasp at my clothes as I walk along. They are the āregularsā who work these streets on a daily basis. Their affiliation to older ābossesā plain for anyone to see. Their office is my road. It is their eyes that will stay with me when I return home. They are the voiceless and nameless children who occupy this city, its sharp edges fracturing their childhood as each day passes.
This book presents a study of street childrenās involvement as workers in Bangladeshi organised crime groups, based on a three-year ethnographic study in Dhaka. The study focuses on the views and experiences of 22 children from the streets and slums. Drawing on participant observation and group interviews with the children, the study explores how these children perceived organised crime and why young people become involved in these groups. It argues that childrenās perspectives are essential, even when the subject under discussion is the adult world of organised crime. The study also utilises data drawn from interviews with 80 criminal justice practitioners, NGO (non-governmental organisation) workers and community members and three years of participant observation of the Bangladesh criminal justice system and wider society.
This book offers the following contributions to knowledge. First, the study documents how Bangladeshi organised crime groupsāthe mastaansāoperate. It explores the structure of these groups, the crimes they commit and their subculture. The study demonstrates that mastaans are mafia groups that engage in a variety of crime and violence and operate in a market for social protection. The book develops a social protection theory of the mafia.
Second, the study explains how street children work as labourers within these mastaan groups. These children are hired to carry weapons, sell drugs, collect extortion money, participate in āland grabbingā, conduct contract killings and commit political violence. The book will argue that these children are neither victims nor offenders; they are instead āillicit labourersā, doing what they can to survive on the streets.
The book will explore how mastaan groups offer street children a way to earn money and access patronage, protection and inclusion, and in doing so, develops the concept of āprotective agencyā to explain how, and why, street children engage with Bangladeshi organised crime groups. The book considers the implications of the study in regard to policy and practice. It considers the culpability of children who engage in organised crime and the new discourse of Southern criminology, which seeks to rebalance criminology and develop learning in places outside of the global North, including Bangladesh. The book concludes with final thoughts related to future research, childrenās rights and ways to better protect vulnerable young people, in Asia and wider afield.
Dhaka, Bangladesh
I arrived in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, in 2010 after my husband, a Foreign and Commonwealth Office employee, was posted there for a period of three years. Living in Bangladesh was an exciting prospect, although childrenās involvement in group-related offending was quite familiar to me. Before arriving in Dhaka, a fascination with crime led me to complete a bachelorās and a masterās degree in criminology and criminal justice, both of which included some focus on gangs and organised crime. I worked for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in London with young people involved in gangs and violent crime and then on a strategic level, reviewing policies relating to violent crime and developing the MPSā first manual on gangs. In addition, I worked with the British Prison Service to carry out a large-scale study which explored ways of preventing young peopleās involvement in gang violence and organised crime.
Our posting to Bangladesh provided a unique opportunity for me to consider what I already knew about group-related offending but in a place that was unfamiliar to me. Initially I sought to study the gangs of Bangladesh; this was my area of expertise and I wanted to consider how gangs operate, the ways in which they commit violence and how and why young people become involved in these groups. However, everything I knew about gangs was from an Anglo-American or āglobal Northā perspective. To me, the gangs in the United Kingdom are subcultures; they consist of young men who operate in small groups on the streets, commit robberies and deal drugs. These gangs are concerned with defending territories and gaining respect, but they operate largely as single entities and their members return to their homes in the evening; they do not live their entire lives on the streets.
Things are different in Bangladesh. One of the first things that struck me on arriving in Dhaka was that I could see crime. Desperately vulnerable children would run up to my car window and beg for money, their feet shoeless and their clothes ragged. I would give the children money and watch them run across the road and put the money into the hands of men who stood in doorways sheltering from the sun. I never saw the children get anything in return; they would scurry back to the cars waiting at the traffic lights to begin working again. I also witnessed many instances of people, including children, giving money to police officers in what appeared to be acts of extortion. I started to ask questions. I wanted to know what was happening to these children; I wanted to explore who these men were and what role the police played. I wondered whether I was witnessing gang-related activity or something more organised. It soon became clear that I had a lot to learn about crime in Bangladesh, and in 2010 I began this study to explore the relationship between street children, gangs and organised crime.
Criminologists argue that there are certain conditions that predispose a locality, whether it is a neighbourhood, city or country, to organised crime and gangs (Hagedorn 2008). Bangladesh suffers from many of these conditions, notably a fragile state, endemic poverty and pervasive slums (Lewis 2012). The stability of the country is precarious; it is vulnerable to climate change and disasters, both natural and man-made (ibid.). It feels hot, crowded, chaotic and unstable. So, what does this mean for the involvement of street children in gangs?
This study aimed to fill several large gaps in knowledge. First, there have been hardly any studies conducted in Bangladesh (or South Asia) which explore gangs or organised crime. The reasons for this are unclear but the fact remains that while scholars have long debated the gangs in America, and increasingly in other countries, this study offers the first robust empirical piece of work about the gangs of Bangladesh. Furthermore, because so little is known about organised crime in Bangladesh, there is no way to assess how these groups operate, the hierarchies that exist among them or the role children play in these criminal businesses. This study fills these lacunae.
In addition, no other study has considered street childrenās involvement in organised crime in Bangladesh; rarely are street children asked what they think about the issue. This is a serious omission. As this study will show, street children are highly informed about organised crime. Not only do they know how organised crime groups operate, but street children also work as the labourers of these groups, which means it is vital that their views be included in any debate about the subject.
If there is one thing I would like the reader to take away from this study, it is that we need a new way to conceptualise the involvement of children in organised crime. During an extensive review of the literature, I discovered that children who become involved in armed conflict or criminal activity are commonly described as gang members, child soldiers, victims of exploitation or children āinvolved in organised armed violenceā (Dowdney 2007, p. 9). However, none of these terms sufficiently explain what happens to street children in Dhaka. This book proposes an alternative view; that street children, who operate at the bottom echelon of organised groups in Bangladesh, are labourers, that is, unskilled or semi-skilled workers engaged in some of the Worst Forms of Child Labour (ILO 1999). This study will consider why this proposition better explains the work street children do and why they do it.
The idea that children work within crime groups is not new. The International Labour ...