Bacha bazi

Bacha dance performance in the city of Samarkand (in modern-day Uzbekistan), c. 1910

Bacha bazi (Persian: بچه بازی, lit. 'boy play') is a pederastic practice in Afghanistan and in historical Turkestan, in which men exploit and enslave adolescent boys, sometimes for sexual abuse, and/or coerce them to cross-dress in attire traditionally only worn by women and girls and dance for entertainment. The man exploiting the young boy is called a bacha baz (literally "boy player") and the young boy is called a bacha.