Iraq's Unspeakable Crime

[Richard]

This is progress?

Richard's $.02

Iraq's Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters
Rania Abouzeid, Time, 7 Mar 2009

She goes by "Hinda," but that's not her real name. That's what she's called by the many Iraqi sex traffickers and pimps who contact her several times a week from across the country. They think she is one of them, a peddler of sexual slaves. Little do they know that the stocky, auburn-haired woman is an undercover human rights activist who has been quietly mapping out their murky underworld since 2006.

That underworld is a place where nefarious female pimps hold sway, where impoverished mothers sell their teenage daughters into a sex market that believes females who reach the age of 20 are too old to fetch a good price. The youngest victims, some just 11 and 12, are sold for as much as $30,000, others for as little as $2,000. "The buying and selling of girls in Iraq, it's like the trade in cattle," Hinda says. "I've seen mothers haggle with agents over the price of their daughters."

The trafficking routes are both local and international, most often to Syria, Jordan and the Gulf (primarily the United Arab Emirates). The victims are trafficked illegally on forged passports, or "legally" through forced marriages. A married female, even one as young as 14, raises few suspicions if she's travelling with her "husband." The girls are then divorced upon arrival and put to work.

(cont'd) http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...?xid=rss-world

[HQ6]

What is wrong with people? I have two girls, and as a mother, I can't understand how anyone could do something like that to their own flesh and blood.

[Sigaba]

The continued practice of sexual slavery is intolerable.

However, I do believe that the editors at Time cheapened the story with the following statements.

Nobody knows exactly how many Iraqi women and children have been sold into sexual slavery since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, and there are no official numbers because of the shadowy nature of the business.

While sexual violence has accompanied warfare for millennia and insecurity always provides opportunities for criminal elements to profit, what is happening in Iraq today reveals how far a once progressive country (relative to its neighbors) has regressed on the issue of women's rights and how ferociously the seams of a traditional Arab society that values female virginity have been ripped apart.

IMHO, these two statements insinuate that were it not for OIF, Iraqi women and girls would be less vulnerable to predation and exploitation. Moreover, these statements, and the inferences they encourage, obscure the fact that sexual slavery is a problem that is global in scope. (For a different approach to this issue, see here.)

[Surf n Turf]

IIRC, Didn’t Uday (Saddam Hussayn al-Tikriti) and brother Qusay (Saddam Hussein al-Tikritieh) grab “pretty” girls at random and make them concubines. I believe it got so bad that some families would not let their daughters even go near windows for fear of being seen and kidnapped.

I’m surprised this could happen under a religion of Peace, where women are so highly regarded

SnT