www.proisraelforever.com Sex Slave Jihad
- From: proisraelforever@xxxxxxx
- Date: 29 May 2006 18:30:31 -0700
A measure of Islamic fundamentalists' success in controlling society
is the depth and totality with which they suppress the freedom and
rights of women. In Iran for 25 years, the ruling mullahs have enforced
humiliating and sadistic rules and punishments on women and girls,
enslaving them in a gender apartheid system of segregation, forced
veiling, second-class status, lashing, and stoning to death.
Joining a global trend, the fundamentalists have added another way to
dehumanize women and girls: buying and selling them for prostitution.
Exact numbers of victims are impossible to obtain, but according to an
official source in Tehran, there has been a 635 percent increase in the
number of teenage girls in prostitution. The magnitude of this
statistic conveys how rapidly this form of abuse has grown. In Tehran,
there are an estimated 84,000 women and girls in prostitution, many of
them are on the streets, others are in the 250 brothels that reportedly
operate in the city. The trade is also international: thousands of
Iranian women and girls have been sold into sexual slavery abroad.
The head of Iran's Interpol bureau believes that the sex slave trade
is one of the most profitable activities in Iran today. This criminal
trade is not conducted outside the knowledge and participation of the
ruling fundamentalists. Government officials themselves are involved in
buying, selling, and sexually abusing women and girls.
Many of the girls come from impoverished rural areas. Drug addiction is
epidemic throughout Iran, and some addicted parents sell their children
to support their habits. High unemployment 28 percent for youth 15-29
years of age and 43 percent for women 15-20 years of age is a serious
factor in driving restless youth to accept risky offers for work. Slave
traders take advantage of any opportunity in which women and children
are vulnerable. For example, following the recent earthquake in Bam,
orphaned girls have been kidnapped and taken to a known slave market in
Tehran where Iranian and foreign traders meet.
Popular destinations for victims of the slave trade are the Arab
countries in the Persian Gulf. According to the head of the Tehran
province judiciary, traffickers target girls between 13 and 17,
although there are reports of some girls as young as 8 and 10, to send
to Arab countries. One ring was discovered after an 18 year-old girl
escaped from a basement where a group of girls were held before being
sent to Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The number of
Iranian women and girls who are deported from Persian Gulf countries
indicates the magnitude of the trade. Upon their return to Iran, the
Islamic fundamentalists blame the victims, and often physically punish
and imprison them. The women are examined to determine if they have
engaged in "immoral activity." Based on the findings, officials can
ban them from leaving the country again.
Police have uncovered a number of prostitution and slavery rings
operating from Tehran that have sold girls to France, Britain, Turkey
as well. One network based in Turkey bought smuggled Iranian women and
girls, gave them fake passports, and transported them to European and
Persian Gulf countries. In one case, a 16-year-old girl was smuggled to
Turkey, and then sold to a 58-year-old European national for $20,000.
In the northeastern Iranian province of Khorasan, local police report
that girls are being sold to Pakistani men as sex-slaves. The Pakistani
men marry the girls, ranging in age from 12 to 20, and then sell them
to brothels called "Kharabat" in Pakistan. One network was caught
contacting poor families around Mashad and offering to marry girls. The
girls were then taken through Afghanistan to Pakistan where they were
sold to brothels.
In the southeastern border province of Sistan Baluchestan, thousands of
Iranian girls reportedly have been sold to Afghani men. Their final
destinations are unknown.
One factor contributing to the increase in prostitution and the sex
slave trade is the number of teen girls who are running away from home.
The girls are rebelling against fundamentalist imposed restrictions on
their freedom, domestic abuse, and parental drug addictions.
Unfortunately, in their flight to freedom, the girls find more abuse
and exploitation. Ninety percent of girls who run away from home will
end up in prostitution. As a result of runaways, in Tehran alone there
are an estimated 25,000 street children, most of them girls. Pimps prey
upon street children, runaways, and vulnerable high school girls in
city parks. In one case, a woman was discovered selling Iranian girls
to men in Persian Gulf countries; for four years, she had hunted down
runaway girls and sold them. She even sold her own daughter for
US$11,000.
Given the totalitarian rule in Iran, most organized activities are
known to the authorities. The exposure of sex slave networks in Iran
has shown that many mullahs and officials are involved in the sexual
exploitation and trade of women and girls. Women report that in order
to have a judge approve a divorce they have to have sex with him. Women
who are arrested for prostitution say they must have sex with the
arresting officer. There are reports of police locating young women for
sex for the wealthy and powerful mullahs.
In cities, shelters have been set-up to provide assistance for
runaways. Officials who run these shelters are often corrupt; they run
prostitution rings using the girls from the shelter. For example in
Karaj, the former head of a Revolutionary Tribunal and seven other
senior officials were arrested in connection with a prostitution ring
that used 12 to 18 year old girls from a shelter called the Center of
Islamic Orientation.
Other instances of corruption abound. There was a judge in Karaj who
was involved in a network that identified young girls to be sold
abroad. And in Qom, the center for religious training in Iran, when a
prostitution ring was broken up, some of the people arrested were from
government agencies, including the Department of Justice.
The ruling fundamentalists have differing opinions on their official
position on the sex trade: deny and hide it or recognize and
accommodate it. In 2002, a BBC journalist was deported for taking
photographs of prostitutes. Officials told her: "We are deporting you
.... because you have taken pictures of prostitutes. This is not a true
reflection of life in our Islamic Republic. We don't have
prostitutes." Yet, earlier the same year, officials of the Social
Department of the Interior Ministry suggested legalizing prostitution
as a way to manage it and control the spread of HIV. They proposed
setting-up brothels, called "morality houses," and using the
traditional religious custom of temporary marriage, in which a couple
can marry for a short period of time, even an hour, to facilitate
prostitution. Islamic fundamentalists' ideology and practices are
adaptable when it comes to controlling and using women.
Some may think a thriving sex trade in a theocracy with clerics acting
as pimps is a contradiction in a country founded and ruled by Islamic
fundamentalists. In fact, this is not a contradiction. First,
exploitation and repression of women are closely associated. Both exist
where women, individually or collectively, are denied freedom and
rights. Second, the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran are not simply
conservative Muslims. Islamic fundamentalism is a political movement
with a political ideology that considers women inherently inferior in
intellectual and moral capacity. Fundamentalists hate women's minds
and bodies. Selling women and girls for prostitution is just the
dehumanizing complement to forcing women and girls to cover their
bodies and hair with the veil.
In a religious dictatorship like Iran, one cannot appeal to the rule of
law for justice for women and girls. Women and girls have no guarantees
of freedom and rights, and no expectation of respect or dignity from
the Islamic fundamentalists. Only the end of the Iranian regime will
free women and girls from all the forms of slavery they suffer.
.
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