Iraq's Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters

By: Latoyia Kimbrough

According to an article in Time Magazine the trafficking of women has increased since the War in Iraq. Now it is even being done by the mothers of the victims. A woman that has been and undercover human rights activist since 2006 has made it her personal mission to expose this crime even though it means that she has to be exposed to danger. She goes by “Hinda,” but that's not her real name. “Hinda” is what she is called by the many Iraqi sex traffickers and pimps that contact her several times a week from all across the Iraq. She has made them believe that she is one of them that being peddler of sex slaves. She has been working in a place called the underworld which is where evil female pimps hold control and where impoverished mothers sell their teenage daughters into a sex market. These people believe females who reach the age of 20 are too old to sell for a good price. The younger victims those being just 11 and 12 are sold for as much as $30,000 while others are sold for as little as $2,000. "The buying and selling of girls in Iraq, it's like the trade in cattle," Hinda says. "I've seen mothers haggle with agents over the price of their daughters." They traffic both locally and internationally but it is primarily in the United Arab Emirates. There is no exact number on how many Iraqi women and children have been sold into slavery since end of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 but Hinda and others put the number in the tens of thousands.

This is because it remains a hidden crime one that the Iraqi government does not see as a problem and has not aided in solving. Last month Baghdad's minister of women's affairs, Dr. Nawal al-Samarraie, resigned in protest at the lack of resources provided to her office by the government. Although she resigned she didn't think sex trafficking was an issue. "It's limited," she says, adding that she believed the girls involved chose to engage in prostitution. But that is not the real reality because women like Atoor are victims who are being sold by their mothers. Several years ago Atoor was found at a Women's Prison in northern Baghdad after being sold by her mother. Atoor married her 19-year-old sweetheart a policeman when she was 15. Three months later he was killed during one of the many bloody episodes in Iraq's war and after the obligatory four-month mourning period Atoor's mother and two brothers made it clear that they were going to sell her to a brothel that was close to their home in western Baghdad, just as they had sold her older twin sisters. She was scared so she asked a friend in the police force to raid her home and the nearby brothel. After his unit raided the place Atoor spent the next two years in prison. Even though she was not charged with anything that's how long it took for her to come before a judge and be released. She sates that “I wanted to go to prison, I didn't want to be sold,” she says. “I didn't think it would happen to me. My mother used to spoil me. Yes, she sold my sisters but she regretted that. I though that she loved me.”