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E-mailAzzam Al-Turkmani, professional journalist
Monday, January 28, 2008
There are some issues that people prefer not to speak of. We turn our eyes away and claim ignorance – our society, we say, is moral, our culture promotes values, and behavior that is incompatible with those claims is an aberration at most.
Yet unemployment and poverty are on the rise in Syria. With the poor struggling more and more just to survive, those very behaviors we once denied existed in our modern Syria are also on the rise. In particular, unfortunate though it might be, prostitution is on the rise in our cities, as desperate women and their families make ends meet by selling their bodies.
When you pass the Ibn al-Nafis hospital, a number of gleaming office buildings start to appear, all sporting the name Barazah House. It is not clear from the street what these offices do, nor what services they might provide. Their interiors are often crowded with young people, often playing cards in a space too small to accommodate them all. Other offices host several receptionists, with gleaming luxury cars parked waiting just outside the office. If you observe the house long enough, you start to see the receptionists answering phones, ordering a car and gesturing a pretty girl to enter that car. Other cars return, bearing more pretty girls.
Abu Ahmed lives barely five hundred meters from the home of these Barazah houses. He works at a food supply institution, and he told us about how he and his neighbor, Abu Maarouf, gradually realized what the houses really sold.
“At the beginning,” Abu Ahmed said, “we did not know the nature of some of these offices, because they presented themselves as offices that provide real estate or architectural services, or taxis.” After a while, however, the neighbors began to see patterns of behavior in the Barazah houses. They saw girls continuously coming and going, sometimes alone and sometimes in large groups. The girls were dressed provocatively. Sometimes the girls got into the cars waiting in front of the offices. Other times, cars with registration plates from other Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, would stop at the office to pick a girl up
Their suspicions were confirmed as any woman or girl walking in the region became subject to harassment from the visitors of the office. The neighborhood’s reputation began to spread.
The girls working in the Barazah houses come from a variety of backgrounds. Some are gypsies. Others were born in Syria, and an increasing number are girls from Iraq, refugees from the war and turning to prostitution to earn a living.
We spoke with some of the residents of the district. One girl, a university student, told us that one of her friends from school had taken to working at the Barazah houses. Jamila (not her real name) is a tall blonde twenty-three year old with blue eyes, studying commerce and economics at the University of Damascus. She is in her third year there. Her friend told us that Jamila was from a rural area outside of Homs. “She was a very polite and sensitive girl,” we were told. “I knew she was from a poor family from the countryside outside of Homs. This was obvious from the clothes she used to wear and the house she used to live in. But at the university, she met one of our peers who has a bad reputation, and since the beginning of this year, she has changed completely. She moved to Al-Qosaa … Now she has a car.” Her friends at school know that she has taken to earning extra money through prostitution, and she can be found some evenings getting out of luxury cars to enter a Barazah house.
A number of university students live in the area where Barazah houses have been popping up. Samar told us, “Many times I hear laughter when I tell people where I live. Even my friends laugh, because of the offices at the Barazah hosues. Plus, others and I have to face harassment whenever we come and go. There are no patrols at all from the men whose duty it is to suppress these kinds of immoral behavior. No one in the neighborhood has ever heard of any of these offices being closed or any of the drivers being arrested. They just work and do whatever they want without any control.” Her father suggested, “Maybe the owners of those offices pay bribes to the patrols so they won’t come to suppress this phenomenon.”
The offices have grown, to the detriment of the neighborhood. Recently, they had begun renting furnished apartments in family residences, where the girls can take their customers. The people sharing the building know full well that the apartments are occupied only a few hours a day. This brings unwanted attention to the apartment building, whose female residents are subjected to increased scrutiny by those who have come to the district.
A local told us, “I raised several complaints to the authorities until I was able to get the office that was rented in our building closed. But it opened up again after only a short while, and we discovered later that the building is owned by the same person who owns the office, and he pays himself rent to get around the law.” His frustration was evident. “How can anyone who hears about a building rents space like that distinguish between an honorable lady and these girls as they enter and leave the building. Especially since the prostitutes often wear respectable clothing when she isn’t working, so she looks no different than the other women living there.”
Ploys like the one described above are common. The offices all claim to offer real estate or taxi services or the like, and the owners have connections that enable them to keep up this legal fiction. If anyone tries to get an office closed for being an unlicensed brothel, the office is quickly reopened by the influence of bribes and high placed supporters.
Such open prostitution not only reflects badly on Damascus’ reputation, it reflects badly on the authorities in Damascus who are responsible for closing illegal institutions. Yet so long as our ministers and officials engage in illegal prostitution, as we saw with former education minister Ghassan al-Halabi, there is no reason to realistically expect anything to change.
Prostitution is not unique to our time, nor to Syria. Its causes cannot be reduced to a current financial slump, although the economy may cause prostitution to become more common. The first step toward a solution to this phenomenon is to return to the policies of the 1950s and 1960s, when prostitution was recognized as a profession and licensed legally. Only then can prostitution be kept safe and be kept out of residential neighborhoods, where it causes trouble for inhabitants just trying to make a living.
Monday, January 28, 2008
There are some issues that people prefer not to speak of. We turn our eyes away and claim ignorance – our society, we say, is moral, our culture promotes values, and behavior that is incompatible with those claims is an aberration at most.Yet unemployment and poverty are on the rise in Syria. With the poor struggling more and more just to survive, those very behaviors we once denied existed in our modern Syria are also on the rise. In particular, unfortunate though it might be, prostitution is on the rise in our cities, as desperate women and their families make ends meet by selling their bodies.
When you pass the Ibn al-Nafis hospital, a number of gleaming office buildings start to appear, all sporting the name Barazah House. It is not clear from the street what these offices do, nor what services they might provide. Their interiors are often crowded with young people, often playing cards in a space too small to accommodate them all. Other offices host several receptionists, with gleaming luxury cars parked waiting just outside the office. If you observe the house long enough, you start to see the receptionists answering phones, ordering a car and gesturing a pretty girl to enter that car. Other cars return, bearing more pretty girls.
Abu Ahmed lives barely five hundred meters from the home of these Barazah houses. He works at a food supply institution, and he told us about how he and his neighbor, Abu Maarouf, gradually realized what the houses really sold.
“At the beginning,” Abu Ahmed said, “we did not know the nature of some of these offices, because they presented themselves as offices that provide real estate or architectural services, or taxis.” After a while, however, the neighbors began to see patterns of behavior in the Barazah houses. They saw girls continuously coming and going, sometimes alone and sometimes in large groups. The girls were dressed provocatively. Sometimes the girls got into the cars waiting in front of the offices. Other times, cars with registration plates from other Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, would stop at the office to pick a girl up
Their suspicions were confirmed as any woman or girl walking in the region became subject to harassment from the visitors of the office. The neighborhood’s reputation began to spread.
The girls working in the Barazah houses come from a variety of backgrounds. Some are gypsies. Others were born in Syria, and an increasing number are girls from Iraq, refugees from the war and turning to prostitution to earn a living.
We spoke with some of the residents of the district. One girl, a university student, told us that one of her friends from school had taken to working at the Barazah houses. Jamila (not her real name) is a tall blonde twenty-three year old with blue eyes, studying commerce and economics at the University of Damascus. She is in her third year there. Her friend told us that Jamila was from a rural area outside of Homs. “She was a very polite and sensitive girl,” we were told. “I knew she was from a poor family from the countryside outside of Homs. This was obvious from the clothes she used to wear and the house she used to live in. But at the university, she met one of our peers who has a bad reputation, and since the beginning of this year, she has changed completely. She moved to Al-Qosaa … Now she has a car.” Her friends at school know that she has taken to earning extra money through prostitution, and she can be found some evenings getting out of luxury cars to enter a Barazah house.
A number of university students live in the area where Barazah houses have been popping up. Samar told us, “Many times I hear laughter when I tell people where I live. Even my friends laugh, because of the offices at the Barazah hosues. Plus, others and I have to face harassment whenever we come and go. There are no patrols at all from the men whose duty it is to suppress these kinds of immoral behavior. No one in the neighborhood has ever heard of any of these offices being closed or any of the drivers being arrested. They just work and do whatever they want without any control.” Her father suggested, “Maybe the owners of those offices pay bribes to the patrols so they won’t come to suppress this phenomenon.”
The offices have grown, to the detriment of the neighborhood. Recently, they had begun renting furnished apartments in family residences, where the girls can take their customers. The people sharing the building know full well that the apartments are occupied only a few hours a day. This brings unwanted attention to the apartment building, whose female residents are subjected to increased scrutiny by those who have come to the district.
A local told us, “I raised several complaints to the authorities until I was able to get the office that was rented in our building closed. But it opened up again after only a short while, and we discovered later that the building is owned by the same person who owns the office, and he pays himself rent to get around the law.” His frustration was evident. “How can anyone who hears about a building rents space like that distinguish between an honorable lady and these girls as they enter and leave the building. Especially since the prostitutes often wear respectable clothing when she isn’t working, so she looks no different than the other women living there.”
Ploys like the one described above are common. The offices all claim to offer real estate or taxi services or the like, and the owners have connections that enable them to keep up this legal fiction. If anyone tries to get an office closed for being an unlicensed brothel, the office is quickly reopened by the influence of bribes and high placed supporters.
Such open prostitution not only reflects badly on Damascus’ reputation, it reflects badly on the authorities in Damascus who are responsible for closing illegal institutions. Yet so long as our ministers and officials engage in illegal prostitution, as we saw with former education minister Ghassan al-Halabi, there is no reason to realistically expect anything to change.
Prostitution is not unique to our time, nor to Syria. Its causes cannot be reduced to a current financial slump, although the economy may cause prostitution to become more common. The first step toward a solution to this phenomenon is to return to the policies of the 1950s and 1960s, when prostitution was recognized as a profession and licensed legally. Only then can prostitution be kept safe and be kept out of residential neighborhoods, where it causes trouble for inhabitants just trying to make a living.
Some of the names of our contributors have been changed to protect their identity. The names of people interviewed have also been changed. The opinions expressed in our regional pieces reflect the beliefs of their writers, and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or opinions of the Tharwa Foundation and its members.
