"She Makes Them Stand In Separate Corners"

by hilzoy

CNN, about Iraqi women (h/t Stephen at Ezra's):

"The women are too afraid and ashamed to show their faces or have their real names used. They have been driven to sell their bodies to put food on the table for their children -- for as little as $8 a day.

Suha, 37, is a mother of three. She says her husband thinks she is cleaning houses when she leaves home.

"People shouldn't criticize women, or talk badly about them," says 37-year-old Suha as she adjusts the light colored scarf she wears these days to avoid extremists who insist women cover themselves. "They all say we have lost our way, but they never ask why we had to take this path."

A mother of three, she wears light makeup, a gold pendant of Iraq around her neck, and an unexpected air of elegance about her.

"I don't have money to take my kid to the doctor. I have to do anything that I can to preserve my child, because I am a mother," she says, explaining why she prostitutes herself.

Anger and frustration rise in her voice as she speaks.

"No matter what else I may be, no matter how off the path I may be, I am a mother!"

Her clasped hands clench and unclench nervously. Suha's husband thinks that she is cleaning houses when she goes away."

It's worth stopping here: obviously, I don't know what Suha's husband in particular is like, but I would imagine that there's a non-negligible possibility that if he were to find out, she could be thrown out, beaten, or killed. (And being thrown out means something different in much of the Middle East than it means here: without the protection of your family, it can be very hard to survive by any means other than prostitution.)

To continue:

"Violence, increased cost of living, and lack of any sort of government aid leave women like these with few other options, according to humanitarian workers.

"At this point there is a population of women who have to sell their bodies in order to keep their children alive," says Yanar Mohammed, head and founder of the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq. "It's a taboo that no one is speaking about."

She adds, "There is a huge population of women who were the victims of war who had to sell their bodies, their souls and they lost it all. It crushes us to see them, but we have to work on it and that's why we started our team of women activists."

Her team pounds the streets of Baghdad looking for these victims often too humiliated to come forward.

"Most of the women that we find at hospitals [who] have tried to commit suicide" have been involved in prostitution, said Basma Rahim, a member of Mohammed's team.

The team's aim is to compile information on specific cases and present it to Iraq's political parties -- to have them, as Mohammed puts it, "come tell us what [they] are ... going to do about this."

Rahim tells the heartbreaking story of one woman they found who lives in a room with three of her children: "She has sex while her three children are in the room, but she makes them stand in separate corners.""

Again: in most parts of the Arab and Muslim Middle East that I've been to, prostitution is the most unimaginably shameful and humiliating thing -- the sort of thing you can get killed for, the sort of thing that can make your family refuse to acknowledge your existence for the rest of time -- while a woman's children are her everything. You have to know that to know exactly how horrible it is to think of a woman who can survive only by selling her body while her children are in the room, standing in the corners and facing the wall. It would be awful for anyone; it's unspeakable there.

Comments

[matttbastard]

Hil: Kyle E. Moore of Comments From Left Field also just posted on this vitally important subject.

[Debbie (aussie)]

My god, what have we done? It makes you want to cry and scream all the same time.

[septimosegunda]

Heartbreaking really: women are double victims as so often. By the way, do we have any indcation of who their customers are? Iraquis, foreigners, both?

[Hartmut]

Remember the women in Abu Ghraib that asked to be killed because the sexual abuse they suffered there would cause their family to murder them to restore the "honor" of the clan?
Or the interrogators that blackmailed women with threats to tell their families about the same?
I think there were some especially insidious cases where the interrogators even threatened to tell those things about women that had not (yet) been sexually assaulted.

One can only hope for those men that hell is a myth or they have something unpleasant coming.

[Tim]

Pffft. There's rich people to be saved right here and million dollar washers to be shipped to Iraq. The U.S. isn't made of money, you know.

[John Thullen]

The Cunning Realist (click on the blogroll to the left) has some sordid detail about who the customers are.

No surprise. Twenty-four-year-old Christian Republican apparatchiks did the screwing up inside the Green Zone, but our battalions of contract mercenaries venture outside for their screwing.

Foreigners of all kinds participate, I'm sure. It's an occupation and a war zone. Most occupiers end up pawing the local women. It stems the boredom from wrecking a country and a culture.

The secular but murderous Saddam Hussein was a feminazi, don't you know. That had to be stopped. Now, the women wear the veil, which our menfolk find arousing.

It could be worse. If Phyllis Schafly had her way, and she will, Iraqi women would be encouraged to don bunny suits to greet their men when they arrive home from a rough day of blowing up, I mean, throwing flowers at Americans and everybody else.

I haven't seen Laura Bush trotted out recently to speak of Iraqi women's rights. Another Rovian touch down the rathole.

I suspect, too, that the 15% flat tax instituted the minute our troops reached Baghdad has encouraged entrepreneurship among the women. Didn't Arthur Laffer have a second napkin on which he sketched the effect of lower marginal tax rates on Iraqi women's curves?

[Nell]

Many of the women refugees who have fled to Syria are also supporting their families by prostitution. Busloads of men come in from other countries; the NYTimes article about this isn't to hand now and my memory isn't what it used to be, but I seem to remember Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Truly, it takes a hell to make Saddam's dictatorship look appealing. But that's what there is now for Iraqis.

[Nell]

Sorry.

[Nell]

Any better?

Looks so on preview...

[Hartmut]

Pimps love wars because it produces new whores to exploit. That brings up the question, is it still mainly "free-lance" prostitution or are there signs of an organized (by males) sexploitation market? the former would be bad enough but the latter is almost impossible to get rid of again.

[matttbastard]

Nell: I have post a YouTube vid on prostitution involving Iraqi refugees here. The CFLF post linked above also goes into detail re: Syria.

[Ugh]

Clearly another example of biased liberal media. I'm sure the right-wing noise machine will be right on it, demonstrating that there really is no "Suha" through the amazing power of kerning.

[peggy]

Ugh, you've nailed it.
Usually Arab mothers are referred to as Umm-fill-in-the-blank-with-kid's-name.
Suha is not a mother's name- UmmAhmed or UmmMohammed are mothers' names. Therefore the story is a crock.