Meet The Parent is a personal insight into the life of a single parent family, made up of a Father and two teenaged boys. The reason why the project is so personal is the fact that the single father is my (the photographers) brother. In many ways this dictated the approached I took with the subject matter and strongly influenced the final images.

The way in which I knew the subjects made me want to show the viewer that although the situation wasn’t perfect, its quite possible to bring up children in a warm loving and balanced environment whilst coping by oneself.

How I was trafficked
Laurence Squire

The Upper Canyon
The Courtyard
Hereford
11 - 25 September 2004

“My name is Namita Kartum. I don’t know where and when I was born. I have never had parents. Someone told me they were dead.

When I was very little, I was brought to the village of Kharashambol to live with my uncle an aunt. They were very poor. They both worked hard in the fields, but we never had enough to eat. I didn’t go to school. I had to help my uncle and earn money. Sometimes I would carry two big loads of wood tied at each end of a long stick resting on my shoulder. This was hard work and my back ached constantly, but some people paid a few takkas for my wood. Other times, I would ask the man running the place where they make bricks if I could work there for the day. I would sit for hours in the sun, breaking bricks, sometimes with a little hammer, sometimes with a stone. In one day, I could bring home 30 Takkas (about 35p).

But we were still very poor and my uncle had his own children to feed, so when I was 12, he arranged a marriage for me. My uncle couldn’t pay for an expensive dowry, so my husband was very poor too.

I went to live with my husband’s family. I still had to work hard, fetching water, preparing the little food that we had and working as a daily labourer when my husband let me. When I was 14, I fell pregnant. But my husband got sick and died when I was one month pregnant. My child was born but also died because he was sick.

My husband’s parents didn’t want to keep me because they didn’t have enough money and I was useless to them. I had to leave. I started working as a maid. It was a terrible life. The people I worked for were beating me and I was always hungry. I was all alone because people were avoiding me as I didn’t have a husband, and sometimes they would even beat me. It was unbearable, my body ached all over and I was so hungry, one night I left. I didn't have to pack, I didn't have anything. I went to the railway station. I didn’t have any money to get on the train. I just sat on the ground.

Then a woman came to talk to me. She was so friendly and I was so upset that I told her my whole story. She listened to everything I said and held my hand. She took me to her house and gave me some rice and daal. That night I slept on a mat next to the woman. The next day, the woman said we were going to Dhaka. I had never been and I was really excited. And the woman said that I would get a good job there. I had never felt so happy.

When we got off the bus in Dhaka, the woman went to talk to some friends of hers. She told me that they had agreed to take me to Satkhira. The woman said it would be good there, so we said goodbye and I went with the friends of the woman. When we got to Satkhira, we all went to stay at somebody’s house.

During the night I was raped so many times I can’t remember.

It happened again every night after that, until I just agreed to do what they said. I had to be with men every day and every night. There were some other girls there too. I stayed in that house for five years.

Then one day the police came and arrested everybody. We all went to safe custody, in prison. We had nowhere else to go and no one came for us. I stayed in the prison for several months. It was miserable and I was hungry all the time.

The people from the shelter home came to get me one day. Now I am 22 and I have been living in the shelter for 2 years. Here I do embroidery and make food for the other girls. What else is there for a woman to do? No one wants me. I want to go home. I have no home. I want to go home.”

Namita now has a two-year old son, most probably fathered by a client. She was rescued and sheltered by Concern Universal’s partner organisation the Dhaka Ahsania Mission (DAM), as part of their Child and Woman Trafficking Prevention Programme (CWTP).

DAM is a non-governmental organisation in Bangladesh working at the grassroots level as well as national and international levels. DAM works to render all possible help to the suffering humanity at large with a basic thrust on poverty alleviation and socio-economic empowerment of the poor, especially women.

The CWTP Programme aims to raise trafficking awareness within communities, arrange for rescue, repatriation, rehabilitation or reintegration of the victims of trafficking. DAM also runs a Shelter Home which provides basic health and psychological support, arranges resettlement of the rescued victims in their family and runs vocational and literacy programmes.

Names and places have been changed in the interest of privacy.