Syrian women and girls being bought and sold

From the Washingtonpost.com:

“This is not exploitation. This is generosity,” said Ziyad Hamad, whose charity, Kitab al-Sunna, is one of the largest organizations helping Syrian refugees in Jordan.

Well, that all depends on one’s point of view.  Currently there are about 300,000 displaced Syrians because of civil war.  For a family with a widowed daughter, a dowry of $5000 is pretty hard to resist when you have left with the clothes on your back. If you are a wealthy man from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, the offer of marriage might be considered generous or exploitative.

“Of course I would rather her marry a Syrian, someone from our community, but what can we do?” Abu Yousef said of his daughter, whose husband was killed in the Syrian uprising. Although he at first rejected the idea, Abu Yousef said he had consented to an arrangement proposed by a 55-year-old retired Saudi engineer as an opportunity to provide for his widowed daughter, 27, and her three children.

The women have little or nothing to say about their fate in this patriarchal middle eastern society.  On the other hand, they never have had a great deal of say in their fate.

Refugees and relief officials said increasing numbers of Arab men and matchmakers have made their way to the camp, some of them posing as aid workers. They say the problem is growing along with the camp, near the northern Jordanian city of Mafraq, in part because many refugee families are impoverished and desperate.

United Nations officials said that most of the marriages are brokered and that many are not consensual. The results, they said, include increasing numbers of child brides and marriages that, in some cases, end in abandonment or forced prostitution. U.N. and Jordanian relief agencies estimate that some 500 underage Syrians have been wed this year.

This seems to be just another form of slavery.  The UN can speak out all it wants  but local customs will be as they are, especially  poverty  spreads.  There seems to be a tendency for some of the men to consummate the marriage and then divorce the woman.  How is this different than prostitution with papers?

All over the world women and girls are subjected to the whims of males.  Even if males aren’t assuming an aggressive role, other women are bound by tradition that accomplishes the same purpose, such as the nasty, brutal habit of what is called female circumcision but is actually genital mutilation.   Back to my mantra, unless women can control their own reproduction, they simply will not have gender equality.  It is all a matter of degree, whether the woman is sitting in a tent on the border of Syria and Jordan or in an apartment in Indiana.  Who decides one’s own fate?

How many of these women (and their children) will be abandoned or sold into prostitution is unknown at the time.  There is increased interest shown by wealthy men from as far away as Canada.  I see them as sexual predators and I hope the world treats them as such.