Iraqi sex slave in Dubai
Blast from the past:
Mariam, 16, relives the day her father in Baghdad sold her off as a domestic worker in one of the prosperous Gulf nations. Instead, she was forced into the sex trade.
“I was a virgin and didn’t understand what sex was. I was told that they [the traffickers] were going to get good money for my first night with an old local man who paid for my virginity. He was aggressive and hit me all the time,” Mariam, who refused to reveal her real name, told IRIN.
Thousands of Iraqi women are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous sex worker traffickers seeking to exploit young girls’ desperate socio-economic situation for profit, United Nations agencies have reported.
In Mariam’s case, she was taken to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and kept in a house with 20 young girls, all of them sex workers, she said.
Before she left Iraq, she and her three sisters were being cared for by her father. Their mother was killed during the US-led invasion of the country in 2003.
…pretty terrible. Much of this would dry out if the Emirates adopted a proper attitude towards these things, abstaining from blocking relatively harmless internet sites such as TAGGED. Instead they could close down
places like the CYCLONE CLUB and revise the way they enforce their legislation, arresting the customers rather
than the girls… it is a shame from a Country that wants income from Western tourists
Comment by John M — March 21, 2008 @ 12:08 am