The Lies My ‘Loverboy’ Told Me™

Kidnapped by gangs as children, sold by their own family and tricked by boyfriends and pimps, this is life inside the Bangladeshi village entirely dedicated to prostitution. Every day, more than 1,500 women and girls are forced to serve the wishes of more than 3,000 men a day for as little as £2 in the village of Daulatdia, home to one of the world's largest brothels. Bangladesh is one of the few countries that tolerates prostitution and girls are being forced into following their mothers into the exploitative industry from as young as 14 - the country's age of consent. Trapped until they have repaid their debt, girls trafficked into Daulatdia - made up of a series of shacks spread over a maze of alleyways - face a lifetime of physical and mental suffering that no child should be subjected to.  'We just want to play, we like playing. I wish someone could arrange another place for us, somewhere outside where we can live,' one innocent girl who has been swept up by Daulat...

This is the story of my friend Dolly She told it to me only one day after we met. I’ll never forget that soft and warm afternoon in June, with an orange sun hiding behind a tall building on Hollywood Boulevard, and my face wet with the stain of silent tears. ‘A lot of first things happened that year,’ Dolly said with a blank look in her eye, while soothing an imaginary painful spot underneath her ear. ‘It was my first time doing cocaine, my first time having sex — although not by choice — the first time getting pregnant, and the first time getting trafficked. It was a hell of a year!’ One hot summer day, as she was enjoying a date with her boyfriend on the beach in Atlantic City, where she was living at the time, Dolly’s life was cut short. He raped her, kidnapped her, and sold her into prostitution. At the time, Dolly was 15 years old and a virgin. Nobody went looking for her: she came from a broken home; her mother was absent and cold, and her father had made a new family with a much...