Human Goods

Dubai, by most accounts, is something of a fantasyland. Exploding with new money that begets uninhibited , almost Dr. Seussian, architecture and draws affluent business and pleasure-seekers from around the world, it has also, much like Las Vegas or Amsterdam, become what I like to call an exception zone. A playground of privilege, if you will, where things you might not do elsewhere become acceptable. Because, hey, it’s Dubai. The rules don’t apply in this surreal metropolis.

Except wherever money and power accumulate, exploitation almost always follows, flying under the radar and making both business and pleasure attainable. Night clubs pulse with military contractors, tourists, and Arab businessmen seeking easy sex with Iragi refugees. Filipina maids, obtaining jobs abroad so they can send money home to their children, are often abused (sometimes quite sadistically). There have been numerous cases of maids being thrown out the windows of lavish, otherworldly skyscrapers that peak up, Jetson-like, above the clouds on a foggy day.

But it makes a kind of sense– where there is excess, people become increasingly expendable. And easy to replace.

Glen Carey, for The Asian Sex Gazette, published an article on the trafficking of persons to Dubai:

Dubai has transformed itself from a trading village to the Persian Gulf’s financial and tourist hub with lower taxes and a more vibrant nightlife than other Gulf states. Bars heave with men drinking $10 beers and women in short skirts.

That’s attracted rich Saudis, US oil workers flush with cash after stints in Iraq, and bankers who are paid as much as 40 percent more than those in London or New York.

Affluence has increased the demand for laborers and housemaids, and the development of laws to protect them from exploitation hasn’t kept pace, the International Labor Organization said in an e-mailed response to questions.

Women from Asia and Africa often sign contracts to work as maids, waitresses, hairdressers and secretaries, only to have employers confiscate their passports and force them to work as prostitutes, the US report said. Others work excessive hours under the threat of mental, physical or sexual abuse until they can pay off recruitment costs.

According to the article, Dubai, which is ranked on the Tier 2 Watch List of the U.S. Trafficking in Persons report, is making an effort to curb the problem. Carey writes, “In July (2007), the UAE formed a committee of senior officials to combat human trafficking, and it has opened a shelter for abused women. In the past year it has closed 40 hotels and clubs that allowed prostitution, said Anwar Gargash, minister of state for Federal National Council Affairs in Dubai.”

Such efforts are well and good. But you have to wonder, as you do with Vegas, about how much the problem really can be eradicated when the whole culture of the place, the essence of it, what makes it saleable, what makes its market value shine, is precisely the fact that it assuages the guilt of the haves by promoting their entitlement to the labor and bodies of the have-nots and building on the delusion of the Western right to pleasure at all costs. Costs which usually remain invisible to most of us who can’t even imagine having to surrender the autonomy of our bodies and souls.

In the end, Dubai is an exception zone, yes. But only more obviously than the rest of the world we occupy.

(Source: Marie Claire)

Marie Claire published a piece by Danielle Pergament on the trend of Iraqi refugees engaging in survival sex (you can also see a video under an April entry on Human Goods called “Survival Sex: The Untalked-about Consequence of War”).

Pergament details the lives of a few women who formerly led middle class lives in Iraq, until “the Americans arrived.” Some of them were able to use their skills to work as translators for awhile, but when work in the Green Zone became too dangerous, they fled to places like Jordan.

In many countries, refugees are given sanctuary but are not permitted to work. Since war eliminates many means of male support because male family members are lost, killed, “disappeared,” often women, and children too, have no choice but to engage in sex work for survival.

Weirdly, and unnervingly, some of these women found themselves serving the same basic clientele (military, foreign contractors, etc) that they used to translate for, when they had the right to work.

Here’s the teaser to the article:

Imagine: One day you’re a nurse leading a quiet middle-class life; a few years later you’re in a strange country doing the unthinkable: selling yourself. For some Iraqi refugees, prostitution is the only trick they feel they’ve got left.

On the Immigration Here & There blog, Elise Barthet explores the trend of Lebanese families purchasing foreign maids, a symbol of economic prestige. In Lebanon, Barthet writes, buying a maid is as common as buying a car: “And just like cars, maids are imported.”

Although the women often come through legal agencies and are somewhat trained for the domestic work, they frequently have their passports confiscated when they arrive and suffer physical and sexual abuse. According to Barthet,

Beirut employment agencies promote them as merchandise or, in extreme case, as pets. They offer advice about which nationalities are supposedly docile, easy to maintain or “harder to break.”

Pets????

That’s a first, even for me.

This Indonesian maid reportedly got gangrene after being tied up in Saudi Arabia for a month.

(Reuters photo, Source: BBC News)

The BBC reported on the decision of a Saudi court to overturn a ruling that would prosecute employers who physically abused their Indonesian maid.

The maid, Nour Miyati, allegedly suffered from gangrene after being tied up and left without food for a month in 2005, according to the report.

Her employer was originally sentenced to “35 lashes,” but the sentence was overturned and instead Miyati will just be paid $670 in damages.

Human Rights Watch is challenging the government to impose a heavier sentence. The BBC quotes them saying it “sends a dangerous message to Saudi employers that they can beat domestic workers with impunity and that victims have little hope of justice”

William Finnegan’s “The Countertraffickers,” is a compelling account, in this week’s New Yorker, of one crusader at the Office of International Migration’s Moldovan office, and what she does to rescue trafficked women.

It’s lengthy, but worth it, especially to gain insight into the utterly chilling world of forced prostitution in the city-state of Dubai (which seems at once both Wonderland and wasteland), where frequently the incredibly wealthy control the incredibly impoverished in some pretty gruesome ways.

This report from Current TV explores prostitution in Dubai further.

(source: Current TV)

The Higher Council for Motherhood and Childhood is teaming up with the Yemeni government to kick off a new initiative to combat trafficking in children. One big step is to gather accurate data to better define the scope of the problem.

Although it is unclear just how big the issue is here, in April the General Administration of Women and Juvenile Affairs told IRIN that they had already rescued 49 children from being smuggled across the Saudi border since the beginning of the year.

The plan (if it is actually carried out) is thorough in scope: it examines socio-economic factors that put children at risk of being trafficked, steps that can be taken to prevent it, and improvements to laws that will help prosecute traffickers.

The project is funded by UNICEF.

Wars, without fail, create refugees.

But despite frantic international conversation about weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and democracy, the welfare of those refugees falls a little by the wayside.

What happens to Iraqi refugees once they’re removed from the war zone?

Last year, Nihal Hissan reported in The Independent on the plentiful nightclubs outside of Damascus, overflowing with refugee girls– most of them teenagers.

Iraqi refugee women have no legal means of making money if they have no male family members with them.

For many, there is no other option besides prostitution, or, as this NBC report dubs it– “survival sex.”