Abuse of Women by Shias / Iranians

[Debater]

2002 FACTS AND FIGURES ON

THE SITUATION OF WOMEN IN IRAN


FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOMS AND HUMAN RIGHTS


- Tens of thousands of women have been executed in Iran since 1979, when the mullahs took power. They were executed on political grounds, for their opposition to the policies of the ruling government. Among those executed were tens of pregnant women.
The worst kinds of torture are inflicted on woman prisoners who oppose the regime. These include repeated sexual assaults, amputation of body parts
Women played a very active role in the 40,000 teachers' demonstrations outside the Majlis on January 12, 2002. In these series of demonstrations, a number of women were arrested and imprisoned on charges of just participating in a demonstration.

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

- Women are attacked and flogged in public.
The state-run daily Abrar on February 20 wrote a 16-year-old runaway girl was sentenced to 55 lashes and three months detention.

- The state-run dailies reported that six women were flogged in public in the city of Roudan and four others were flogged in Tehran. (Kayhan daily, November 20 and Entekhab, November 13.)

- A 16 year old girl was sentenced to 100 lashes. Somaya was arrested and sentenced to flogging for running away from home. (Nowrouz, April 4)

- Female members of the Revolutionary Guards flogged a 20-year-old girl in public in Qom. (Towse’eh daily, April 18) Her crime was that she was wandering in the streets; she was a runaway girl. In addition to the 100 lashes she received in a park, this girl is doomed to stay in prison for four years.

- Woman Sentenced to Death for Self-Defense, March 15:
The clerical regime’s Supreme Court confirmed the death sentence for Afsaneh Norouzi, 32, who has been in jail since 1997 for killing a man who wanted to rape her. The high court upheld the sentence, ignoring all witness accounts indicating that Afsaneh was acting in self-defense against a rapist.


EDUCATION & GIRL CHILDREN

- 67% of the students deprived of education are girls between 11 and 16 years of age. This is indicative of great inequality.

- Two million girl children between ages 7 and 18 do not have the opportunity of attending classes.

- The number of girl children who drop out of school is on the rise due to negative atttitutde toward women's education, early marriages, shortage of education space and educational facilities.

- Out of a total of 10,712,000 illiterates, 6,600,000 are women.

- In the rural areas, 30.1% of girls between 15 to 17 years of age have to quit school in elementary years, and 18.2% in early high school years.

- Over 76% of nomad girls are deprived of high school education.

- The State Security Forces arrest 50 runaway girls every day in Tehran. This includes only the individuals intercepted by the police. The actual figure is much higher. According to a police report, 2,000 runaway girls are presently missing in Tehran.

- The number of runaway girls has increased 30%.

SOCIAL ILLS

- The suicide rate in Iran is one of the highest in the world. 75% of the victims are women, 81% of whom are between 15 to 31 years of age. The average age of those attempting suicide is 25.

- The number of women committing suicide is 1.5 times greater than men.

- More women burn themselves as a sign of protest:

One of the Iranian regime’s officials acknowledged that a rising number of women and girls in Iran commit suicide by setting themselves ablaze. He said: Self-immolation among women is a symbol of protest against the discriminations they suffer from in the society. There are other ways for committing suicide, but women set themselves ablaze to express their protest. (Towse’eh, April 7)

- General Director of Tehran’s Prisons: 66.2 percent of addicted prisoners in Iran are women, 51.2 percent of whom have families. (Qods daily, February 12, 2002)



EMPLOYMENT

- Only 9% of Iranian women are employed. 72% of these women work in the educational sectors.

- Only 600,000 of the country's 29.5 million women have jobs.

- 65% of women and girls who graduate from colleges and universities, do not find any jobs and are forced to stay at home.

- The reason for nine out of every 10 women who are dragged into prostitution, is poverty. The second most common reason is unemployment.

LAWS- Husbands can prevent their wives from working outside, if they realize that a woman's job is interfering with the interests of the family.

- Husbands can divorce their wives whenever they wish and without presenting any reasons.

- Women are banned from teaching boys older than 10 years of age.

- Woman is the inferior sex, whose testimony is worth half the testimony of a man.

- Women do not have the right to enter sport stadiums. In the football game between Iran and Ireland in Tehran on November 15, only Irish women were permitted to enter the stadium. This is an absolute violation of the most basic rights of the Iranian women.

http://www.wfafi.org/Factsheet-09-05-02.htm

[Debater]

EFAF HOUSE: RELIGIOUSLY LICENSED PROSTITUTION IN IRAN

by Mitra Sistani

Special to Iran Press Service

KOLN, 4 Aug. (IPS) The growing problem of street prostitution in Iran has called into action national institutions. A highly controversial plan, defended by the Interior Ministry's Deputy for Social Affairs Ms. Ashraf Boroojerdi, met with sharp criticism from women's groups and religious quarters last week.

"Some people believe that talking about such issues is taboo, but they are part of the reality of society, and turning a blind eye will not solve the problem," the BBC quoted Ms. Boroojerdi as saying.

According to the conservative journal "Afarinesh", a committee of several national boards discusses the establishment of a specific institution, somewhat equivocally baptized as Efaf, or Chastity Houses.

Authorities say that Chastity Houses mainly aims at installing religiously legitimate sexual contacts between men and women, who are not able or not willing to enter matrimony. Based on "sigheh", a contemporary marriage arrangement peculiar to Shiite religion, possible couples would be temporarily united according to a bureaucratic scheme.

All applicants have to sign up at a registration center first, which includes a free health check, where contraceptive services and even abortion for unwanted offspring are offered. An advisory center then arranges the couples, while another would issue a temporary marriage license, paid by the man. The couple would then be conducted to specific hotels or guesthouses, where they could consummate their arrangement without police harassment.

The "chastity houses" would not be open to any male -- only those with identity cards proving they were bachelors, widows, or married to women incapacitated by physical or mental illness would be admitted.

Certain Tehran hotels have already been earmarked for possible use, the newspapers said.

The head of the Imam Khomeini Research Centre, named after the revered founder of the Islamic republic, gave his backing to the plans in a press interview Monday.

"It is vital that we set up these decency houses, given the urgency of the situation," Ayatollah Mohammad Musavi-Bojnurdi told the "E’etemad" daily.

Considering the delicate matter, religious officials, the judiciary and the police are designated to constitute the board of trustees of Efaf.

Apart from the fact that sigheh has repute close to legalised prostitution in Iranian society, the question is, who would profit from this new plan. In 2000, a religious official from the city of Karadj, west to Tehran, was condemned for white slave trade. According to other reports, mullah candidates under critical hygienic conditions on the New Cemetery of the Holy City of Qom extensively practice contemporary marriage.

Women's groups and others reacted angrily, denouncing the plan as little more than licensed prostitution.

"It's euphemism for the official establishment of houses of corruption, the normalisation of illegitimate relations, and the destruction of the family", a member of the Women's Social and Cultural Council said.

Ms Boroojerdi nevertheless insists on this plan, describing it as a necessary response to social realities put under taboo.

Given the sharp reactions, it seems unlikely that Efaf houses will become reality.

The plans floated in the press were "contrary to morality and family values," the justice ministry said in a statement Monday, categorically denying any part in drawing them up.

"The judiciary considers that this proposal is completely without merit and warns those who are airing such ideas to stop upsetting public opinion".

But even when the scheduled "Chastity houses" would be set up, it will not help to solve the problem. In a young society with two thirds of the population below 25 years of age, prostitution increasingly appears as the last resort to high unemployment and strictly enforced segregation of the sexes.

According to welfare officials, at least 300,000 prostitutes are working in the country.

Controlling 60 percent of the domestic trade through religious foundations, as well as the clandestine drug and antiquity markets, it appears as if the ruling clergy is looking for a new source of revenue by profiting from socially and politically deprived women. ENDS EFAF HOUSES 4802

Editor’s note: Ms Sistani is a researcher working with German institution.

She contributed this article to IPS

Taken from: http://www.iran-press-service.com/articles_2002/Aug_2002/efaf_house_4802.htm

[Debater]

She Found Prostitution Among Iran's Holy Men

They Found a Way to Put Her in Jail.

Week of March 28 - April 3, 2001
Unveiled Threats
by Camelia E. Fard
The Village Voice

... June 1999 - My guide motioned to the driver to stop so I could step out and adjust my black chador. We had traveled an hour from Tehran and were now near the tollbooth where visitors pay an entrance fee. Before us, a sign read: "Welcome to the City of Blood and Uprising."

Minutes later, we were inside the Vatican of the world's 100 million Shiite Muslims, the home of the seminary where mullahs and government leaders are trained. We were inside the holy city of Qom, a place foreigners and researchers rarely go.

Wrapped in their black chadors, women-or "the hidden attractions of Qom" as they are sometimes called-milled among the crowd. They were nondescript, with nothing to set them apart from the flow of students, teachers, and bureaucrats. Yet these were no average women. They had come to agree to a sigheh, a temporary marriage, to lie beside a Muslim man for a few miserable minutes and earn the pittance that sustained their wretched lives. It is for this little-known dimension that Qom is known as a place of "both pilgrimage and pleasure." It's also why clerics and political figures don't welcome reporters here.

The use of prostitutes among Islamic leaders remained something of an open secret until last month, when President Khatami shut down a ring of runaway girls pimped by a mullah who served as head of the local court.

Long before Khatami stepped in, I had come to Qom, hoping to finish six months of reporting about the conditions faced by women here. This article had become so important to me that I couldn't just set it aside.

I would learn these women's stories, and with the help of my former editor, I would find a newspaper or magazine that would tell the world about their plight.

My work soon took me to the Sheikhan cemetery, in the courtyard of an ancient mosque in the city center. The burial ground is not far from the resting place of Massoumeh, a female Shiite saint whose shrine draws a sea of pilgrims to the city every year. There, the women sat silent and motionless on the dirt graves, the black chadors that covered even their faces and hands the only indication that these pitiful heaps of humanity were women.

From the four corners of the courtyard, clusters of young seminary students, clad in the traditional turbans, robes, and capes worn by mullahs, teemed into the courtyard, some smiling as though about to embark on a trip, others looking at the women to see who was new and who had been there many times before. Some surveyed the pictures of the martyrs from the 1980-88 war with Iraq that adorned the walls, but most surveyed the human wares. A thin young boy, watering can in hand, washed the floor of the courtyard all day, looking for a customer who would want his services for an introduction to one of the women.

I didn't need his help. I approached them myself. When one pulled her chador aside, I could see she was a young woman in her mid thirties, hair streaked with cheap blond dye, a brightly colored blouse cinched tight to reveal her cleavage, and a mess of garish makeup giving away her poor, rural background. Another was hardly more than 20. When the women uncovered their faces, the murmurs of the young men hovering around us intensified. Their lips recited holy blessings, but their eyes surveyed the bare faces and necks of the women. In fundamentalist Islam, a man who intends to marry-even if only for a day-is allowed a single glimpse of the woman's face to make his choice. These brief unveilings would be their only chance.

My presence among the women had disturbed the otherwise tranquil business. I asked the woman with heavy makeup to step outside the cemetery with me, but I was worried the men would get suspicious. Mehri fixed the seminary students circling around her with a look of anger and contempt. "I don't care," she said, almost spitting. "I hate these kids."

Safely outside the courtyard, she told me how she ended up selling herself in temporary marriages. She had been married to a truck driver who died in an accident a few years ago, leaving her with seven small children and a teenage daughter who had a baby girl of her own. Mehri said she also weaves carpets, but the money is never enough, so three times a week she takes an hour-long bus ride here. While she talked to me, she looked my driver and guide up and down, considering whether they might be in the market.

Need, sadness, and regret filled her eyes. The pungency of soaking sweat, from hours of waiting under the hot sun, surrounded her. In the busy months of summer, when men travel to Qom from other cities for prayer and fun, Mehri might take a temporary husband three times a day. "Locals don't pay much," she said. "Outsiders are better customers."

And where are these marriages consummated? "If they have a home, they take me there," she said. "If they don't, it's to the New Cemetery." A cloud of dust and wind churns through the ancient, forgotten New Cemetery, several kilometers from Qom. No one comes to this remote, silent cemetery to visit the dead. The only visitors are women with temporary "husbands" in tow.

The women come furtively, believing this life is still more honorable than begging in the streets. They make what passes for a living, fulfilling their own monetary needs and those of their children and other loved ones, away from the prying eyes of neighbors. None believes in selling her body, and unlike prostitutes in other parts of the world who try to attract customers by baring more of themselves, these women clutch their chadors more and more tightly from shame and humiliation. At least in the cemetery, they feel secure. "The home of the dead is a safe place to be," they say.

For a few minutes, until the man is finished and they have their money, they lay their bodies next to the client on an old wooden bed covered with a thin mattress. Here, inside the dusty, cobwebbed tombs, they receive between 20,000 and 40,000 rials-a little less than a week's rent of a cheap house-for the consummation of a temporary marriage.

Originally intended to provide legitimacy to what would otherwise be illicit affairs, the practice of temporary marriage has become a threadbare cover for prostitution and an under-the-table means of social welfare for poor women. The participants no longer follow the rules, which call for a mullah to read a particular blessing. The man just calls, and the woman comes to him. The "brides" are supposed to remain celibate for three and a half months after each divorce to ensure they aren't pregnant, but many flout the statutes. They have no choice. They need the money for survival.

Not surprisingly, they have few options for preventing pregnancy or disease. According to official health ministry statistics in Iran, each year some 90,000 women apply for abortions at hospitals, and every day 221 abortions take place. Though no one claims these abortions stem directly from temporary marriages, health ministry insiders suggest prostitution may be to blame. Shahrbanoo Amani of Tehran, a member of the Iranian parliament, told reporters last year that "because temporary marriage is by definition temporary and is not a permanent agreement, usually men in this marriage do not like that a child is born. And in a case of unwanted pregnancy, the first victim is the woman, and the second, the child."

Children born of temporary marriages face difficulties in getting the identification papers needed for school and work. Without these papers, they are shut off from family inheritance and from government assistance normally available to poor or orphaned kids. The shame follows them all their lives. Women who engage in temporary marriages can find themselves locked out of chances to get better-paying jobs and shunned by their families. For them, the name of the brief marriages-sigheh-becomes an insult.

The stigma hasn't stopped younger girls from turning to prostitution. When teenagers run away, this is often their only means of making money.

Latest estimates suggest some 40 percent of prostitutes who work the street have no permanent home, but live in brothels and sleep in shrines, like the one dedicated to Ayatollah Khomeini. The girls of this new generation have cast aside the flimsy pretense of temporary marriage in favor of a direct cash-for-sex transaction. A guard in Qom tells me that girls of all ages and types come and go in groups. Some sleep in the rooms reserved for pilgrims. "We report some to the police," the guard says, "but we cannot control them all."

He says they take buses to the city-girls who have fled their homes to escape poverty or the fear of dishonor that comes with having lost their virginity. They fear the wrath of their fathers and brothers, but end up in worse shape on the streets. "In the big cities," he says, "nothing awaits them but despair."

I coax Fatima, a 16-year-old girl standing in a corner, into talking. Her heavy lipstick fits neither her young age nor the conservative fashions of this religious city. She motions to her friends to wait for her at the stairs. In the rude language of a teenager, she tells me that her stepmother used to beat her and make her watch her three siblings. She had to do the housework and wasn't allowed to attend school. "They wanted to marry me to a 60-year-old man," she says.

Fatima knew no one in Qom when she arrived. Now she was under the care of a woman named Ezzat, a madam in charge of several others girls. Ezzat gave them a home and some protection from the dangers of the street.

These teenage sex workers present a problem for Iran's law enforcement.

They're too young for prison, and they're no longer good candidates for marriage. Their families are reluctant to tak them back in. As soon as a girl is released from jail, other madams and customers put her back into business. Sometimes when police arrest an underage prostitute, they send her to a place like the Rehabilitation Center for Girls in Tehran-if there's room. The flow of runaway girls never stops, because the cause of the trouble, Iran's patriarchal society, is so difficult to fix. So the girls provide a bit of private fun for the rich men of Tehran, and buy themselves a lifetime of misery.

As more girls drift from the suburb of Qom to the city in search of customers, says Tehran official Hojatol-Islam Mohammad Ali Zam, the average age of prostitutes has dropped from 27 to 20. The girls bring with them the full range of social and medical problems, including a need for abortion. Since most can't pay for proper services, they end up risking their health on back-alley operations.

http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/prostitution_holy_men

[SlaveOfAllah]

The title should be 2002 MISCONCEPTIONS and LIES ..it betters suits it.

...with a taste of zionista propaganda and protocols.

[ygalg]

The title should be 2002 MISCONCEPTIONS and LIES ..it betters suits it.

...with a taste of zionista propaganda and protocols.

do you have unbiased sources that confirmed this is a Zionist propaganda or it is just convenient to say?