This week, I was asked to watch a documentary on the prostitution and exploitation of young boys in Afghanistan. A documentary about what they locally refer to as Bacha bazi, or “dancing boys”.
It was a tough watch. Very tough… “Masculine”, “rugged”, “manly”-men, veterans of twenty years of warfare, and powerful fixtures in their communities in northern Afghanistan, trained and groomed young boys to emulate women. Kids who were then traded and shared, and implicitly fucked, in a micro-economy of wealth and power. And it made me sick to my stomach.
A colleague of mine caught me just as I was shrugging off the red mist from watching the film. When I described what I had just seen, she recoiled. Understandably so. And asked me “why would you watch that?!”
But how could I not?
The world is filled with objectionable content. Murder, slavery, abuse… you can practically paint the walls of a decently sized planet with all the despicable things mankind has come up with. Some of the horrors that we on a regular basis inflict on each other is enough to unmake a person. And much time and effort is spent toward ignoring, forgetting, and avoiding our darkest parts.
But as Edmund Burke said; “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.
Fair enough, watching a documentary about child sex trafficking isn’t really doing anything about it. Especially from the safe distance of half a globe away. But you know what, evil deeds thrive in darkness. And as long as you don’t look at them, they will continue to. And shining a light into darkness is the first step to dispel it.
It’s hard. I get it. Plenty of people don’t want anything to do with the dark corners of humanity. We are content to live in our little placid bubbles, safely ignorant of the icky creeping in at the borders. Some claim that they can’t physically and/or mentally handle it. That they’re so fragile that it risks breaking them.
Well; tough. Because looking away from something doesn’t make it go away. I, at an early infant age, learned object permanence. Wrapping oneself in ignorance does not make the ghosts dissipate. It just makes them able to flourish behind your back. So yes; I watched the film. I watched and I shuddered. Why? Because it’s important. It is important to look and behold whatever you find despicable. Whether it’s climate change, or institutional racism, or animal abuse, or sexual predations in a war-torn country.
Because seeing evil is the first step to combat it. Because looking away from it is tantamount to endorsing it. And I, for one, do not want to be part of the problem.
/Sebastian Lindberg 27/4-2021
WastedWords 