Indonesian Muslim woman tells CNN her story of being made a sex slave in Saudi Arabia

by: Salaam

Tue Nov 17, 2009 at 21:52:54 PM EST

New Time magazine article: Iraq's unspeakable crime: Mothers pimping daughters

by: Salaam

Mon Mar 09, 2009 at 10:38:25 AM EDT

A teenage girl looks on as Iraqi troops and U.S soldiers from 1-64 AR search the house she lives in with her mother in the Jamia district of western Baghdad. March 17, 2008. From The Telegraph.

From Time magazine report:
Nobody knows exactly how many Iraqi women and children have been sold into sexual slavery since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, and there are no official numbers because of the shadowy nature of the business. Baghdad-based activists like Hinda and others put the number in the tens of thousands. Still, it remains a hidden crime; one that the 2008 US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report says the Iraqi government is not combating. Baghdad, the report says, "offers no protection services to victims of trafficking, reported no efforts to prevent trafficking in persons and does not acknowledge trafficking to be a problem in the country."

While sexual violence has accompanied warfare for millennia and insecurity always provides opportunities for criminal elements to profit, what is happening in Iraq today reveals how far a once progressive country (relative to its neighbors) has regressed on the issue of women's rights and how ferociously the seams of a traditional Arab society that values female virginity have been ripped apart.

Story here.