‘We have no one’: The women and girls sold as brides in Kashmir

 

Arsheeda Jan* speaks fluent Kashmiri with an accent that suggests it is not her first language. The 43-year-old is originally from Kolkata but now lives in a two-room wooden home on the banks of the river Jhelum on the outskirts of Srinagar city. Her eyes fill with tears as she describes how she arrived in Kashmir more than two decades ago.

Her parents died when she was a child, she explains, and she and her four siblings were sent to live with relatives. “We were very poor,” she says.

When she met a middle-aged Bengali woman who promised her a job in a shawl factory in Kashmir, Arsheeda saw an opportunity to earn some money. She was 13 years old.

“She told me that will provide me with a job in Kashmir and we have to do embroidery on shawls. I had no idea where Kashmir is,” Arsheeda recalls.


She didn’t tell her siblings about her plan.

When she reached Kashmir, the woman, who was herself married to a Kashmiri man, kept Arsheeda in her home for a week. During that time, Arsheeda says she did all of the household chores in the belief that the woman was going to help her build a better life for herself.

“I kept on asking her ‘where is the job?’ Then one day a man and his father arrived with a bearded man who was supposed to do my nikah (marriage contract).”

A photo of a woman looking outside through a window indoors.
Arsheeda has had no contact with her family since she was trafficked two decades ago [Rifat Fareed]
When Arsheeda cried, the cleric explained that he could not marry her against her will and left. But the family found someone else who was willing to do it.

“The agent threatened me that if I raise my voice she will kill me. I was very scared,” she says.

Still just 13, Arsheeda was married to a labourer nine years her senior.

“When my husband entered my room for the first time, I was shivering. I tried to flee many times but failed. Then I became pregnant. I gave up on the idea that I can ever leave this life,” she says.


Arsheeda, who now has four children, has had no contact with her family in Kolkata since she left.

“When there is a fight with my husband he asks me to leave and pay the money for which he bought me,” she says.

Pointing to a scar on her forehead, Arsheeda explains: “My husband beats me sometimes and he taunts me.”

When her husband is violent, she says she tries to take shelter in her neighbours’ house but that they are unwelcoming. “[They] inform my husband,” she explains. “Some neighbours assume I have slept with many men, that’s how they think I landed here. They don’t understand …”

“Everyone looks at me differently. I still feel alien.”

Link

Slavery: A 21st Century Evil - Bridal slaves

'I was bought for 50,000 rupees': India's trafficked brides

In a nearby village, Saeeda* holds her youngest daughter as she talks about how she was brought to Haryana 20 years ago with her sister.

“I only know that I arrived in Haryana when I was 11,” she says. “I was brought here with my sister but I haven’t seen her since we arrived.”

She was sold to Azim, a widower 20 years older who already had six children by his first wife. She says she was beaten by her husband and his family. “They wanted me to obey them, and if I objected they always had the same words for me: ‘We own you because we bought you.’”

Saeeda was visited by activists from Empower People who told her what rights she had as a wife and mother. Now, her husband has agreed to give her a property in her name, which means that she and her children are secure if Azim dies before she does.

Many paros, she says, are thrown out of the family home when they are widowed. Her home has become a meeting place and refuge for the other paro women living in her village, and she also helps others in her wider community who have been trafficked into marriage.

“Now I have enough courage to fight,” she says.

Link

Ross Kemp Extreme World - India

This was hard to watch, because well it is India. The way women are dehumanized and murdered for the pleasure and profit of men, yet another side of the evil that is patriarchy. The trafficker admits he targets Advasi and Muslim girls, it made me think all the men that care so much about cows or are obsessed with hijab/purdah why does this not concern you? 

Poverty-stricken Indian women forced into prostitution in Middle East

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Madagascar maids: Misery in the Middle East

Forced to work as a "slave maid" for wealthy families in Lebanon for 15 years, Abeline Baholiarisoa - a 59-year-old woman from Madagascar - finally achieved her freedom in March.

Madagascar's government chartered a plane to evacuate her and 85 other women.

The youngest of her four children, whom she left behind when he was six years old, played a key role in her evacuation, tracking her down via a welfare agency that rescues "slave maids", she says.

Ms Baholiarisoa says she was trapped in "a living hell" after being duped into going to Lebanon.

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A recruiting agency had promised her a nursing job for three years, with a salary of $800 (£486) a month.

Ms Baholiarisoa says she thought it would give her a chance to save money, which she could send to her children.

But her dream was shattered the minute she touched down in Beirut.

"It was a trap, because as soon as I got there they took away my papers and said my contract didn't mean anything," Ms Baholiarisoa says.

"They said, 'Abeline, this is null and void.' For the next 15 years they shattered my life and the lives of my children."

Ms Baholiarisoa says she was put to work as a maid with another Malagasy woman in the house of a rich couple with newborn triplets.

"We didn't have time to eat or sleep - night and day. We didn't even have time to clean ourselves.

"I worked 24 hours a day and received $160 a month. From this, I had to pay the lady of the house money for my food because they only gave us a quarter of a loaf of bread and some bits of fruit each day."

'Women crippled'

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Ms Baholiarisoa says she ran away from her first job after seven months and her second job after two years.

But with no papers and no way to return home she was forced to accept maid jobs for 12 more years.

Fabienne Marie Ange - a social worker with Madagascar's Union of Qualified Domestic Workers (SPDTS), which specialises in helping "slave maids" - says many of them are so traumatised that they do not even know where they are.

"Sometimes in Lebanon the boss gives them drugs to keep them strong. They have to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and they don't eat properly. It has an effect on their mental [health]," Ms Ange says.

Ms Baholiarisoa says she refused her employer's attempts to give her pills for "stress", but she knew of people who ended up with an "empty brain" after taking them.

"You become like a beast, like an animal made for work," she says.

Some women are forced to work in Lebanon's clubs and streets as prostitutes, while some maids sell their bodies on the side just to pay for food, Ms Ange says.

According to SPDTS President Noro Randimbiarison, some of the women have died in mysterious circumstances in Lebanon.

When their bodies were eventually returned to Madagascar, it was discovered that several of them had missing organs.

"Some families decided to open the coffin and found that the girl didn't have eyes, her eyes had been replaced by doll's eyes, or they didn't have a tongue or intestines or the heart. This really happens. It's real," says Ms Randimbiarison.

Medical reports on the cause of death are vague - and some families have been told that the women committed suicide by jumping off tall buildings, she says.

Ms Baholiarisoa claims women were pushed from windows, sometimes to cripple them just enough so they could not run away; others disappear, fuelling suspicion that they were killed.

'Trafficking rackets'

"We have no idea how many women have died out there or have gone mad because if you ask a boss where is his maid they say she ran off with someone and it's over," she says.

"Where is the proof that she's run off and they haven't buried her in the courtyard? We don't have any proof."

Madagascar's Minister of Population Nadine Ramaroson, the only government minister tackling the issue, says "a very organised network" involving senior government officials and businessmen emerged in the 1990s to engage in human trafficking.

Government officials provide fraudulent work permits, travel and identity document for around $5,000 per trafficked woman, social workers say.

Ms Ramaroson says the government is trying to break the criminal networks, but it is not easy.

While one job agency flew 300 women to Jordan last month with the government's approval, 43 women bound for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were stopped from boarding planes.

Ms Ramaroson said all were recruited from remote rural areas with high illiteracy and poverty levels. Some 16-year-old girls were given forged identity papers showing their age as 21.

She said their contracts stated they would work in top institutions "when these girls don't even know what electricity is".

Ms Baholiarisoa considers herself lucky. Given up for dead by her older children, her youngest child - now an adult - contacted SPDTS to help trace his mother.

They picked up one of her many calls for repatriation at the consulate in Beirut, she says.

Ms Baholiarisoa now helps SPDTS track down other women trying to escape Lebanon and to prevent other women from being duped into taking jobs in the Middle East.

"If the madam at SPDTS hadn't taken me in with open arms I don't know what I would have done," she says.

"It pains me that these girls are leaving because I know what awaits them, especially the beautiful ones."

From the plane load of women rescued in March, Ms Baholiarisoa is the only one with a job.

Some of the women have returned to discover husbands remarried and children adopted.

Others, like Ms Baholiarisoa, have to rebuild relationships after much hurt and loss.

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Human trafficking and UAE

More than one million people, the majority of them women and children, are smuggled across international borders to work in near slavery every year, the US state department says.

Its 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report lists more than 170 countries which it claims are not doing enough to tackle the problem.

Al Jazeera met "Svetlana", a Uzbek forced to work in the sex trade in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

She recounted how she was offered a job as a waitress, but the woman who had originally promised to help her in Tashkent took away her passport and threatened to harm her family if she did not co-operate.

After years of abuse, "Svetlana" has found refuge at the United Arab Emirates' first shelter for the victims of human trafficking.

Staff at the Abu Dhabi Shelter for Women and Children say that although her story is common, there is too little awareness of the situation.