Tricked and Trapped: Human Trafficking in the Middle East, ‎pdf 4.1 MB

go there for one objective.” A third client said: “You feel like they don’t want
to do it but you don’t see them crying. Once it’s over, they get up. There is
no love involved.” 164 Some clients are concerned about the fate of the sex
workers, though, as is clear from one journal article based on fieldwork done
in the UAE. The author narrates a conversation with a migrant worker:
This prompted me to ask if he had ever tried to help these trafficked women, when
he encountered them on his own visits to brothels. They cry and beg me to take
them out [of the brothel]. Take me away! I’ll come with you, they say. But it is
very difficult to take them out with their pimps there. I’ll give them some money,
about 100 dirhams or something. If they manage to come out [of the brothel], we
buy them phone cards so that they can call and speak [on the phone to their family
overseas]. What help can we really give? 165
That at least some sex workers in the Middle East are victims of trafficking
is apparent from the adverse working and living situations imposed on them
through the use or threat of force or other penalties. There were striking
similarities across all four countries studied in the mechanisms that were used
to coerce these women, although not all indicators were present in every
single case.
Non-payment for services, retention of wages and manipulation of debt
Key informants spoke about wages being withheld. Often the workers are
told (much like the domestic workers) that they must forgo their first few
months’ salary to cover the costs of their recruitment. A sex worker in the
UAE explained that she could take no time off, because “as a first timer, you
work when you are told to work until you repay all your debt, even if you
don’t want to”. As one study found, “the fact that victims often receive little
or no money from their forced prostitution means that their debts are not
repaid and that the cycle of abuses continues”. 166
There are also cases involving family relatives who withhold the wages of the
women they have coerced into commercial sex work. A sex worker in Amman,
Jordan, who was working at a bar, explained: “There are some women who
are forced by their husbands to work and their husbands will take half of the
earnings.” Another sex worker working at a bar in Jounieh, Lebanon, said she
earned between US$100 and US$150 a day, and “all the money I have, I give
it to my boyfriend, but it is wrong to give the money”. A sex worker from the
same bar exclaimed: “My boyfriend pushed me to prostitute myself and he is
taking the majority of the money I get!”
164
Interviews with three Egyptian clients of sex workers, Kuwait, 1 Apr. 2012.
165
Kathiravelu: “Social networks in Dubai: Informal solidarities in an uncaring State”,
in Journal of Intercultural Studies (2012, Vol. 13, No. 1), p. 109.
166
SCEME: Karamatuna, p. 27.
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