Last month, Time Magazine reported on how mothers in Iraq and selling their daughters out to human traffickers. The report mentions that girls as young as 11 and 12 are being sold to traffickers at prices up to $30,000. Others are sold for upwards of $2,000. The girls are then trafficked primary to other areas in the Middle East, such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, however Iraq has become a major hub of this despicable and lucrative activity. The girls, once sold, are able to enter the destination country through the use of counterfeit passports or other forged documents. Occasionally the documents have been suspected to have been governmentally forged as well.
Unlike the typical sex industry, Iraq's underworld is a place where female pimps hold sway and 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. In order to get some of the young girls into the country (many of them around the age of 14), men pose as their "husbands" and then divorce the girls upon arrival once out of the country.
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. There is no official number because of the shadowy nature of the business. Baghdad-based activists like Hinda and others estimate it to be in the tens of thousands. Still, it remains a hidden crime, one that the 2008 U.S. 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 millenniums 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.
