Bangladesh likes to pretend prostitution does not exist, yet some of South Asia’s most enduring red-light districts continue to function in plain sight. Officially, the country’s Constitution instructs the state to prevent prostitution, wrapping the issue in moral language. In practice, however, adult sex work survives in a legal grey zone: tolerated in specific locations, violently suppressed outside them, and constantly instrumentalised by politics, policing, and real-estate interests.
The contradiction became impossible to ignore in 1999, when authorities shut down Tanbazar, once one of the largest brothel complexes in South Asia. Hundreds of women were forcibly evicted and detained in state “vagrant homes” in the name of moral reform. The backlash was swift. In 2000, Bangladesh’s High Court ruled that prostitution itself was not illegal and that adult women could not be detained merely for selling sex. The judgment did not legalize brothels outright, but it cracked open the fiction that sex work was simply a crime to be erased.
Today, the country’s most visible brothel hub is Daulatdia, a sprawling settlement near a major Padma River ferry crossing. Often described as Bangladesh’s largest brothel, Daulatdia is estimated to house well over a thousand women. Its location is no accident. Long-distance truck drivers, ferry passengers, seasonal laborers and migrant workers pass through daily, generating a steady flow of clients. Rooms are rented by madams, payments are tightly controlled, and police presence oscillates between protection and extortion. Despite the requirement that women sign affidavits declaring themselves adults who entered sex work voluntarily, underage girls continue to be identified there by NGOs and journalists.
Another symbolically charged district is Kandapara, often described as one of the country’s oldest red-light areas, with roots stretching back nearly two centuries. Kandapara was bulldozed in 2014 after local authorities declared it immoral and illegal, leaving women sleeping in the open. After legal challenges and sustained pressure from rights groups, many returned. Kandapara has since become a focal point for sex-worker organizing, illustrating how survival in Bangladesh often requires collective resistance rather than legal certainty.
Less internationally known but deeply entrenched are brothel zones in Faridpur, particularly around Rathkhola and the river-adjacent C&B Ghat and Decreer Char areas. These districts, historically tied to river trade and transport, have hosted several hundred women at different points. In the southwest, Banishanta stands as a reminder of extreme precarity: a small, impoverished brothel settlement repeatedly threatened by eviction, fire, flooding, and neglect, especially as nearby port infrastructure expands.
Across these districts, the profiles of the women are strikingly similar. Most come from rural, economically marginal backgrounds, often from flood-prone or river-erosion zones where livelihoods collapse overnight. Many were trafficked through deception—promised jobs in factories or domestic work, or lured by sham marriages. Others arrived after fleeing violent homes, early marriages, or abandonment. While adult sex work may be tolerated in theory, entry as a minor, still widely documented, locks girls into cycles of debt and control that are almost impossible to escape.
Outside brothels, the risks multiply. In Dhaka, Chattogram, and other cities, “floating” sex workers operate on streets, in parks, hotels, or massage parlors. They are far more vulnerable to arrest under public-order laws, police violence, and sexual assault, precisely because they fall outside the semi-tolerated brothel system.
Historically, Bangladesh’s red-light districts grew where commerce and male migration concentrated: colonial ports, jute-mill towns, river crossings, and transport hubs. What has changed is not their function, but the politics surrounding them. Evictions are frequently justified with religious rhetoric, yet they often coincide with rising land values and redevelopment projects. Moral panic becomes a convenient cover for clearing valuable urban space.
More than two decades after the Tanbazar ruling, prostitution in Bangladesh remains neither fully legal nor fully criminal. It survives as a managed contradiction: women tolerated as long as they stay invisible, silent, and confined to specific streets. The brothels endure not because the state accepts sex work, but because erasing it would require confronting poverty, patriarchy, and exploitation head-on—and that, so far, remains a line Bangladesh is unwilling to cross.
Spicy Auntie sighs, lights an imaginary cigarette, and says: nor criminal, nor legal… what a convenient limbo.
That is how Bangladesh treats its sex workers. Not criminals—at least not officially. Not legal either—God forbid the state admits that women sell sex because poverty, patriarchy, and male demand exist. So instead, the system does what patriarchy always does best: it hovers. It pretends. It looks away while keeping a baton handy.
You are not illegal, sister, as long as you stay exactly where you are told. In that alley. In that brothel. Behind that curtain. Don’t walk too far. Don’t speak too loud. Don’t ask for rights. And above all, don’t make the men uncomfortable by reminding them that you are human.
Spicy Auntie has seen this trick before, all over Asia. A state that says, “We do not approve,” while quietly collecting bribes, votes, and moral superiority. A police force that raids today and protects tomorrow, depending on who paid and who complained. A society that sends its husbands, brothers, sons, and uncles to brothels at night—and then spits on the women in the morning.
The affidavit system? Please. Signing a piece of paper saying “I chose this freely” when hunger, violence, abandonment, or trafficking shoved you into the room is not consent. It is paperwork theatre. It allows the state to wash its hands while children slip through forged birth dates and women are locked into debt like medieval serfs.
And let us talk about the hypocrisy of “rescue.” Bulldozing brothels, throwing women onto the streets, detaining them in so-called vagrant homes—this is not morality, it is cruelty with a religious soundtrack. If you really wanted to end prostitution, you would start with girls’ education, rural livelihoods, domestic violence laws, reproductive rights, and men learning the radical concept of not buying women. But that would require courage. Much easier to evict poor women and call it virtue.
What truly enrages Auntie is this: the same society that refuses to legalize sex work because it is “immoral” has no problem consuming it every day. Porn. Mistresses. Hotel rooms. Trafficked bodies. Silence bought with cash. Morality is only enforced on the powerless.
Nor criminal, nor legal means one thing in practice: no protection. No labor rights. No safety. No real exit paths. Just survival inside a cage painted as tradition.
Spicy Auntie says this clearly: women in sex work deserve what all workers deserve—safety, healthcare, choice, dignity, and the right to leave without punishment. Anything less is not cultural values. It is cowardice dressed up as law.
And yes, Bangladesh—you can do better. You just have to stop lying to yourself first.