“They’re lovely girls, I mean — they’re very endearing, these girls. And what is common with all teenagers across the world is, once you show some interest in what they’re doing, [they open up], and with these girls in particular, no one asks them their opinion. No one’s ever asked them how they feel about things. They’re told to get married. There’s no time for them to discuss their feelings. Some of them were telling me that at work, they’re able to do it with their friends, which is something that they love. But at home, there’s no time for any of that.“It’s just talking about things that didn’t make them feel uncomfortable. So I would never react. It was important to me to not judge them, as they’re talking about being beaten up at 14. Or, essentially, talking about being raped. Just to not make any judgments, let them just talk in their own words like they were in a very safe environment, which they were. And they were very keen to tell their stories.”“Money and marriage in Bangladesh, especially for poor women, go hand in hand. Oftentimes these girls are married off because their families simply can’t afford to feed them. That is the main issue. They cannot feed these girls. And then these men approach them and say, ‘Look, we want to marry your daughter.’ The parents often say yes because they hope that this man will then look after their daughter and it will mean there’s one less mouth to feed. But what often happens, unfortunately, is a few months into the marriage, they start demanding a dowry. Which these families can’t afford. If they had that much money, they probably wouldn’t have married their daughters off.”“[Being abandoned is] devastating to these girls financially. But what’s very interesting about the slum that I was in is that it’s a stone’s throw away from the garment district.“Getting jobs in garment factories — these girls are underage, so they shouldn’t be working, but. There is regular income. They’re earning more than their parents could earn. It transforms them, and the financial independence means they’re not forced to have to marry again. That’s already done away with, because they’ve been married and been left. And in society, they’re respected more. They’re bringing in an income, they’ve no worries about getting food on the table, and, you know, these are teenage girls. They’re very keen to show me that they can still buy their beauty products! They save up, and they buy their creams, and oil for their hair, and they can buy earrings and clips, and it’s with their own money.”The Forgotten Girls of Dhaka is available on radio via bbcworldservice.com , as part of BBC’s Identity series.