By Donna M. Hughes
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 27, 2004
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.
Dr. Donna M. Hughes is a Professor and holds the Carlson Endowed Chair in Women's
Studies at the University of Rhode Island.
The author wishes to acknowledge the Iranian human rights and pro-democracy
activists who contributed information for this article. If any readers have
information on prostitution and the sex slave trade in Iran, please contact her
at dhughes@uri.edu
Donna M. Hughes
Professor & Carlson Endowed Chair
Women's Studies Program
University of Rhode Island
401 874 2757
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes