Sahar Al Haideri, a Mosul-based reporter who was murdered there last month, reported the following story recently featured in the Middle East Times:

MOSUL, Iraq — Asma’s family was facing dire financial problems when a man in his 60s came to her father with an offer that they could not refuse: he said that he would hire Asma for $200 a month to help take care of his wife, who was handicapped.

Asma’s mother is blind and her father is disabled, leaving them struggling to make ends meet. The man assured the couple that Asma could visit them, and that he would raise her with his daughters. The impoverished family took him up on the offer, but Asma, 17, had no idea what was in store for her.

“My work was not only in the kitchen; I had to have sex with [the] son of the man who hired me and his four or five friends,” she said in an interview after fleeing a life of sexual slavery. “I left my father’s house a virgin and now I am …”

She stopped speaking. Her father said nothing except, “I put my trust in God.”

The deteriorating security situation and absence of law and order has allowed sexual slavery to grow in Iraq, with traffickers able to sell victims without fear of punishment.

According to the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, issued in June, Iraqi women and children are forced into prostitution and trafficked inside Iraq and abroad, to countries like Syria, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Iran.

In the volatile northwestern city of Mosul, near the Syrian border, girls and young women from poor and illiterate families are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Many of those hired as domestic servants end up becoming sex slaves.

Khaled, 45, who readily admits to involvement in the sex trade, wears jeans and a yellow T-shirt with four or five rings on his fingers and bracelets around his wrist. This reporter witnessed him speaking to a client about whether he preferred a brown or white girl or woman as a sex slave.

“I know some families who are ready to have their daughters work to earn a living for them,” he said. “Some ask me if [their daughters] can only work in kitchens, while others try to close their eyes and pretend that they have no idea that their daughters are being used as prostitutes.”

Other women seek Khaled out on their own, but do not always know the full extent of his business.

Zaineb, 20, is a thin and beautiful woman with light-coloured hair. She felt financially responsible for her family because her father was arrested by the US military, her mother was ill, and she had younger sisters that needed support. Zaineb got a job through Khaled, but to her horror discovered that she had been forced into prostitution.

“I [have to] sleep with different men each night,” said Zaineb, who managed to contact IWPR. “[My boss] and his friends always take me to a farm, where they get drunk, and then have sex with me. I cry, asking for help from my father and mother, but how can they hear me?”

Victims of sexual slavery in Iraq have little support from the police or the courts. Iraqi law only criminalizes the sexual exploitation of children.

Many women are tricked into sex slavery in Iraq with the promise of a new life in the Gulf.

Khaled convinced 18-year-old Alia’s family that a man in the Gulf wanted to marry her, and paid for her passport and new clothes.

“Like any other bride, I was happy,” she said. “But I discovered after I traveled to the Gulf that the bridegroom was a nightclub manager who used many other Iraqi girls for prostitution. I managed to flee after 10 humiliating months.

“I was screaming when one of [the men] had sex with me; they considered me a slave that they had bought. I lost my dreams, hopes, and future.”

The state department report noted that the Iraqi government did not prosecute any trafficking cases this year, nor did it offer protection for victims or make efforts to prevent or document trafficking. It also said that efforts needed to be made to “curb the complicity of public officials in the trafficking of Iraqi women.”

The names of people mentioned in this story have been changed to protect their identity.

[Cross posted from Mideast Youth]

I don’t think I need to remind anyone here that sex trafficking is a huge issue in the Middle East, especially the Gulf. My concern is not women who choose to do this for their own personal reasons. My concern is women and young girls who are forced to do this on a daily basis with no form of support or help whatsoever.

This kind of corruption is almost always dismissed as “something that exists in every society,” so fighting it is apparently “useless.” This is not an excuse. This is a poor reaction to a major crisis that shouldn’t exist today. The fact remains that it does exist, and it’s happening right here in front of our eyes while we dismiss it, justify it, and ignore it in silence or ignorance. At this point we’re old and aware enough to say: no more. We need to make a bigger effort in raising awareness about what’s going on. We need to be the voice of those who clearly don’t have one in our societies.

Recently I found this alarming documentary focusing on the sex trafficking of Armenian women and girls into Dubai. Do watch:

And this (part 3):

You can watch all the other episodes here.

The woman in the first video justifies this in her own way, claiming that prostitution is a choice that many women can escape, this is factually incorrect. I personally came across many women - Bosnian, Russian, Pakistani, and especially Albanian - who were smuggled here due to war and instability within their own countries. It wasn’t by choice. Many of them came here thinking they were going to end up as waitresses, housemaids, business partners, etc. As soon as they arrive, they have their passports taken away from them, and their lives as sexual slaves begin…

The police? Not an escape. Firstly there are many policemen in the region involved in human trafficking. Secondly, many women get in further danger because if they don’t present a passport or valid documentation (which they usually don’t have access to), they get imprisoned for being within the country illegally and for taking part in prostitution. An example is this excerpt taken from a book:

…. when she arrived in Abu Dhabi she was taken to a brothel where a pimp told her that he had bought her for $7000. From that moment on she was to work as a prostitute until she paid off her so-called debt. After three months of captivity, Tanya managed to escape. She bolted to a police station and recounted her story. Incredibly, she was charged with prostitution and sentenced to three years in a desert prison. In 2001, psychologically crushed and ashamed, Tanya was released. Nothing happened to her pimp. Branded a prostitute by the Muslim nation, she was summarily deported back to her Ukraine.

[Source]

Choosing between years of prison and sexual slavery is not a proper and fair choice, and thus there should be more active organizations that try to tackle this growing issue. We aim to be one of them.

It’s not just women and girls being enslaved. For the past few years, many cases involve young boys from Pakistan, Nepal, Indonesia, etc. Very rarely do news agencies ever make an effort to report such grave crimes against humanity.

For more information, you can always refer to our campaign against this. It’s not the best, but right now, it’s the least that we can do to help.

If you are interested in being an author with us at Sexual Terrorism, please let us know. We are looking for an editor-at-large or contributors to help us keep the site updated and to help its readers stay aware of what is going on in our societies.

Click here for an extensive trafficking report (PDF)

As moclippa notes:

Looking at the Tier ranking, Bahrain made Tier 2 between 2003-2004, and has since steadily fallen back, hitting Tier 3 once again in 2007, the first time since 2002.

Recommendations for Bahrain Include:

“The government should enact a comprehensive anti-trafficking law that criminalizes all forms of trafficking in persons and assigns penalties both sufficiently stringent to deter the crime and adequately reflective of the heinous nature of the crime. Bahrain should also ensure that victims are not punished or deported for unlawful acts committed as a result of being trafficked, and should offer protective services to all victims of trafficking, including women coerced into prostitution and both female and male victims of forced labor.”

“Bahrain made no discernible progress in preventing trafficking this year. The government initiated no new campaigns to prevent trafficking, but continued to distribute multilingual brochures on workers’ rights and resources to incoming workers. The government should ensure that recruitment agencies and employers are aware of the rights of foreign workers to prevent their abuse.” (60)

Tier 3 is composed of:

Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, North Korea, Sudan, Bahrain, Iran, Oman, Syria, Burma, Kuwait, Qatar, Uzbekistan, Cuba, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela.

Click here for a full report.

Wikipedia has it wrong:

In the contemporary Middle East, sexual slavery is uncommon. However, transportation and trafficking of these women does exist there. Iran, Israel, and Turkey have a significant sex trade-much of it involving women from Eastern Europe and poor areas of Northern India.

Sexual slavery is very common in the Middle East as this site proves, especially if we go by their own definition of sexual slavery which includes “forced prostitution.”

Secondly, the majority of it does not involve Eastern European women or “poor areas of Northern India” (how vague is that?), but rather from places such as Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and quite recently Iraq and Iran. Moreover, Dubai has one of the worst cases of forced prostitution (and migrant rights abuses in general.)

The following article is two years old, but the situation is not much different today than it was back then.

Excerpt taken from “Asian Sex Gazette,” which features inappropriate material (visit at your own risk.)

‘There have been some reports that indicate Iraqi women may be subjected to sexual exploitation in prostitution in Syria at the hands of Iraqi criminal networks, but those reports have not been confirmed,’ the report said.

The going rate for an Iraqi prostitute is 10,000 Iraqi dinars ($7), according to The Toronto Star.

Though some women are adopting prostitution to feed their families, others are being sold against their will.

The Independent interviewed two women who were abducted and then sold into prostitution.

‘Because I was not married, I was sold for $6,000, and Sajeeda for $3,000. My hymen had a price - this is when we realized that we were going to have to do bad things with men. We were terrified,’ one of the women told The Independent.

A growing concern of many humanitarian organizations is the young ages of Iraqi prostitutes. In an article for Salon magazine, an outreach organization for refugee children, Good Shepherd Nunnery, in Damascus said they had lost many of their students.

‘In the past year, many of the children attending the nunnery`s learning center suddenly disappeared’ said a sister at the school.

Read more. The article also describes how prostitution in Iraq serves as a last resort to some women.

Domestic servants in some countries of the Middle East are forced to work 12 to 16 hours a day with little or no pay, and subject to sexual abuse such as rape, forced abortions, and physical abuse that has resulted in death.

- World Revolution