Iraq's Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters

[Liberal_in_LA]

Iraq's Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1883696,00.html

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."

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That's where Mohammed's group first saw Atoor several years ago, at the Khadimiya Women's Prison in northern Baghdad. Now 18, Atoor married her 19-year-old sweetheart, a policeman called Bilal, when she was 15. Three months later he was dead, killed during one of the many bloody episodes in Iraq's brutal war. After the obligatory four-month mourning period dictated by Islamic Shari'a law, Atoor's mother and two brothers made it clear that they intended to sell her to a brothel close to their home in western Baghdad, just as they'd sold her older twin sisters. Frightened, she told a friend in the police force to raid her home and the nearby brothel. His unit did, and Atoor spent the next two years in prison. She was not charged with anything, but that's how long it took for her to come before a judge and be released. "I wanted to go to prison, I didn't want to be sold," she says. "I didn't think it would happen to me. My mother used to spoil me. Yes, she sold my sisters but she regretted that. I though that she loved me."

[MADem]

1. It's terrible. I saw this happening over in that region thirty years ago.

It's not a new phenomenon. The article seems to suggest that it is, that it's something that came along after the US invasion, but it isn't. "Temporary" marriages (which are, in essence, mistressy/protituty type arrangements) are not unheard of either.

In some cases, the girls are not sold, they're just "rented." Mother and daughter go to a house, a transaction is completed, and then they leave. It appears on the up and up, because the girl is escorted, and they often pass themselves off as cleaning ladies. Sometimes a male escort will accompany them as well.

It's horrific. But this suggestion that it's a new practice? Nonsense.

[40bama]

2. Same awful situation for women. Just under 'new management'?

Unbearable either way. Women must be empowered. I know that under Saddam, women could be educated and work. They can according to Iraq's new constitution also, but there's so much instability now, and many families are desperate. Too tragic.

[MADem]

7. This shit was happening in "peaceful" Saddam era Iraq.

Those working women with those swell outfits and great jobs and modern outlooks were SUNNI women. They were the ones who got the good jobs, the opportunities, the perks and the education. They lived in the nice neighborhoods and had an oh-so-civilized lifestyle.

The shiite women had less opportunity, WAY more poverty, more discrimination, lived in shitty neighborhoods, were last in line for anything and everything, their menfolk were the ones most likely to die as foot soldiers and cannon fodder in that asinine Iran-Iraq war, their widows survived on paltry pensions..... and this kind of crap was going on under Saddam, too.

Make no mistake.

[Chulanowa]

3. Hardly different from any other region

Where there is poverty, there is prostitution. Poor women with no other prospects always have something to sell. It's certainly not a new practice in Iraq - During the war with Iran, when Saddam was purging hte marsh arabs, daughters and wives would be selling themselves openly to Iraqi soldiers.

[Echo In Light]

5. I'm sure the U.S. occupation hasn't helped the frequency of the problem

[MADem]

6. I wouldn't blame the servicemembers. They aren't wandering around outside the wire. NT

[Fovea]

4. If you are born an object, raised an object

sold as an object seems the natural way of things.

It is, however, beyond the pale where we can say 'this is just their culture'
lynching used to be part of ours.