Instead he gave the mother 20,000 Emirati dirhams for the costs she had incurred in bringing the girl to the country. "Luckily, when I started crying, he didn't touch me," Oksana says in a soft voice. Soon after however, her friend's mother told her to spend the night with an old Afghan man. Her best friend and her best friend's mother, who had earlier moved to Abu Dhabi, persuaded her to come too, saying many well-paid jobs were available. She has been staying in the shelter for a few months now. This was also the case with 19-year old Oksana, of Uzbekistan, who has long brown hair and is wearing a wide flower-print dress. The shelter's staff is made up of Emirati women. "They are often lured to the country by a friend or family member and don't suspect anything." Most of the victims had been offered a respectable job as a receptionist in a hotel or as a secretary in the UAE while still in their home countries, she explains from her office at a shelter in an Abu Dhabi suburb.
#THESSA LAGEMAN FREE#
How many women do this work of their own free will and how many are coerced is unknown, says Sara Suhail, director of the Ewa'a shelters for trafficked women and children. Sex services in the country are also openly advertised on websites and social media. The keyboard player sings in Iraqi Arabic: "Don't be so cruel, Syrian woman. At the tables in front of the stage, men dressed in the traditional Emirati long white garb are drinking strong liquor and smoking water pipes. The walls are draped with purple and red velvet. Plastic flower garlands hang around their necks. In a nightclub on the top floor of a hotel in the northern city of Ras al-Khaima, six women in nylon dresses slowly circle on a stage lit by coloured spotlights. Photo: Thessa LagemanĪ Filipino rock band starts playing and a German tourist comes over and asks where she is from. The women from Nigeria said they wanted to return home as soon as possible.
The living room in the Ewa's shelter for women and children in Abu Dhabi. "I think that in three months I will have earned enough and will go home." It's a big secret," she whispers and adds: "This work is really terrible. "My family would never take the money if they knew.
Now she earns about 20,000 dirhams a month. Photo: Thessa Lagemanįor Tsega, there wasn't any money left from her monthly salary of 5000 Emirati dirhams ($1980) to send home to her sick mother. It is one of the many in the emirate where prostitutes offer their services openly, even though prostitution is strictly forbidden in the UAE and sharia courts can impose flogging as punishment.Īt a hotel bar in the city of Ras al-Khaima foreign women work as prostitutes and wait for customers. Some estimates have as many as 30,000 sex workers in Dubai alone. The country, and especially Dubai, one of the seven emirates, is known as a centre for prostitution and sex tourism in the Middle East. Tsega's fate is shared with thousands of women in the United Arab Emirates. Women from Arab countries walked in circles or moved slowly on the stage. "I started working in a supermarket, but life is so expensive here," she says.Ī rooftop bar at a hotel in the city of Ras al-Khaima. She sits on a bar stool in a dark basement bar in the old quarter of Dubai, dressed in a short skirt.
That's what happened to 24-year-old Ethiopian Tsega*. Once you arrived, you learned the only way to make the promised money was through prostitution. Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Imagine if you were told of well-paid work in a new country, far from your impoverished home.
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