Saudi Arabia runs squalid, abusive jails for women disowned by their male guardians

https://news.yahoo.com/saudi-arabia-runs-squalid-abusive-084458166.html

(Bill Bostock)
,INSIDER•January 21, 2020

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The Saudi government continues to maintain a network of detention facilities — prisons in all but name — for young women who are formally disowned by their male guardians, often for minor infractions.

The centers are called Dar Alreaya. Reasons for being sent there include oquq (disobeying parents) and khulwa (being alone with a man in a closed area). The government describes people sent there as "delinquents."

Each woman's guardian (usually, but not always, her father) has wide discretion over whether a woman should be sent there after doing something that displeases him. Guardians also have discretion over whether to take them back. If the guardian refuses, a woman can stay in Dar Alreaya indefinitely.

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former inmates and rights groups paint a picture of violence, psychological abuse, squalor, forced marriage, and regular suicide attempts.

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One such young woman was Kholoud Bariedah, who was sent to Dar Alreaya when she was 19.

Her four-year sentence, handed down in 2006, was punishment for drinking alcohol at a party with single men to whom she was not related. As well as detention, she was sentenced to 2,000 lashes with a whip.

Bariedah, who now lives in Germany, described to Insider the conditions in which she and others lived, where she said being alone was often the most painful deprivation.

"Girls held in isolated rooms start to go weird and hurt themselves — they destroy the lamps or, in another isolated room, a window, they smash glass and they start to hurt themselves" with the shards, she said.

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A former inmate, her identity protected under a niqab, told the pan-Arab TV network MBC in 2018 that she and others were abused and even forced to eat their own vomit.

"If we ate something and vomit it, they'd made us eat it back up," she said.

"They let men in to hit us. Sometimes the girls and kids face sexual harassment, but if they talk, no one listens."

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