Women in Iran
http://www.womeniniran.com/english/news/9-02/02.htm
No
attempts have been made to track and return the 150 Iranian girls
who have been forced to engage in prostitution.
There
are three districts in Tehran in which the men make a living by each
bringing 3-4 women from remote villages and poor families and
forcing them to sell their bodies.
Although
selling girls is a tradition in certain Iranian border provinces,
but the phenomenon of selling girls by their families or husbands in
metropolitan cities seems to be on the rise. It has been said that
there are three districts in Tehran in which the men make a living
by each bringing 3-4 women from remote villages and poor families
and forcing them to sell their bodies.
While
there were published reports of the sale of an 18 year old girl by
name of Elnaz in the Iranian media recently, thousands of Persian
girls have so far been sold by their families to Afghani men in the
south eastern border province of Sistan Baluchestan so far.
The
Afghani tradition of “wife trading” (which has replaced the
normal process of mating), along with the “shirbaha” tradition
(i.e. to pay a big deal of money to the bride’s family as a
payment for the money they had spend to raise their child) and the
ever growing poverty of families who have sold their daughters, have
forced undisclosed number of Iranian girls to lose their citizenship
status. On the other hand, based on the released information by
local police and justice ministry officials in the north eastern
province of Khorasan, the largest province in Iran, several members
of a sex-slave ring, responsible for selling Persian girls to rich
Pakistani men, have been identified and arrested.
The
monthly publication “Khandani”, publishing this report in its
first edition, wrote: this group would propose to the girls’
families, marry the girls and then sold them to prostitution houses
called “Kharabat” in Pakistan. Khandani’s report cited one of
the girls who were freed from the ring, as saying: the girls were
priced based on their age and beauty, then sold to rich men called
“Khan”. We were treated like slaves, and they exchanged us
whenever they wished, to make huge profits.
Based
on this report, the “slave owners” posed as rich residents of
Zahedan (the province’s capital), marry the girls, taking them to
Mirjaveh province in Pakistan overnight and through special routes,
then they would sell them as slaves in the Pakistani cities of
Kuwaiteh, Karachi and Ravolpendi.
According
to an official report, at least more than 150 Mashhadi girls have
been transferred to Pakistan by this group alone. Despite the
officials’ knowledge of the case, no attempts have been made yet
to track and return the 150 Iranian girls who have been forced to
engage in prostitution.
In
another development, the Hamshahri newspaper (a government funded
morning newspaper in Tehran) recently reported that many Iranian
girls are active in begging business in Iraqi holy cities such as
Karbala, and Najaf. These girls are purchased by Arab men from their
families in poor and destitute villages, and then shipped to these
holy cities to milk the Persian worshippers who are not willing to
pay money to Iraqi beggars.
Iranian
media have in the recent months published reports of Iranian girls
being shipped to Dubai and sold as sex slaves. A monthly journal
recently reported that these girls had been sold by their poor
families for a cheap price.
Translated
by: Akbar Sheikhzadeh _ Toronto, Canada