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FTD wrote:Yesterday my wife and I were in the lift of out apartment and got out in the car park basement. On the other side of the lift door was man and wife fighting. I shouted and the man said there was no problem here, move on.

I said there is very much a problem here and the woman already in tears was begging us to call the police. The man then started going on about how she is crazy, look at the scratch marks on his face and how her brothers beat him up all the time. She then started going on how she has been beaten for the last 3 years and had bruises all over their body.

I said the man, come with me and and have a cigarette, while my wife took the woman away to came down. On the surface it seems a straight forward domestic violence case, if there is such a thing. The wife is mentally and physically abused yet feels there is nowhere to go or anyone to help. She is terrified and started to fight back a little but I don't know how successful this is. Her nerves seem totally gone.

When they were on their own my wife said would she like to her to phone the police and the women then said no and they would not help. We said just get to a hotel and offered her some money to do so. She said she had money but then what she could not stay in a hotel forever.

In the UK numbers for woman's hostels and helpgroups are posted and printed everywhere and the police can also help. In the UAE there seems to be nothing. I knew there was one hostel but I cannot find their phone number, even now on the internet.

At the end of it all though there seemed little we could do, my wife told the woman our apartment number and to come there if she needed to flee in an emergency but what was a bit more shocking though, as we left them and went on about our day, was the amount of collegues and people that said we were foolish to get involved and "it's not like how it is in the UK"

Personally this has nothing to do with the UK and how it is there but the measure of any society is how it individuals treats others in need. In some way we fear the worst when they are behind closed doors again but what could we do?

Anyway, sorry for the rant but this seems to covered right over here in the UAE both by the authorities but by the public, who are often in a position to help.

Could someone get me contact details for any refuge here in Dubai, to pass on if the woman does come to our door? However I would ask anyone if they come across domestic violence to do get involved, you could actually be saving a life.

Speedhump wrote:There was a refuge here, I read it was in trouble landlord-wise but I think it found a new place. Maybe ask newspapers (Gulf News, or 7 Days) for info.

Some of the women who found shelter there did have comlpaints though Sad :

http://www.gulfnews.com/Nation/Society/10195993.html

Refuge shelter boss treated us like servants, say abused women

By Bassma Al Jandaly, Staff Reporter
Published: March 09, 2008, 00:03

Dubai: A number of abused women have accused the owner of a Dubai-based refuge of profiting from their misery.

They claim that Sharla Musabeh, owner of the City of Hope shelter in Umm Suqeim, had received thousands of dollars from foreign media organisations in return for supplying details of the women's troubles.

Fourteen women of different nationalities, and their children, have exclusively voiced their experiences at the City of Hope shelter to Gulf News.

At least two of the victims alleged a top US newspaper paid Sharla thousands of dollars to publish their stories.

Bakhtiyor Madaev, Consul General of the Republic of Uzbekistan, accused Sharla of purposely defaming his country by selling stories about two Uzbek women against their will. Sharla allegedly sold the stories for $2,000 (Dh7,345) each, he added.

Madaev said: "We understand Sharla is using ladies in trouble to make money from international media organisations. She mistreated Uzbek women facing problems in the UAE and forced them to make terrible statements about Uzbekistan.

"She made them say it is a poor country and that Uzbek women working in the UAE were all prostitutes."

The consulate will file a case against Sharla to Dubai Police.

Life of luxury

Ahmad Obaid Al Mansouri, Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Dubai Foundation for Women and Children (DFWC), said 14 women and their children had escaped from the City of Hope and were now being taken care of by the DFWC.

"We recently received two young Uzbek women who were forced by Sharla to stay at the Umm Suqeim villa for one month. She used to pocket money from their misery by selling their stories to a number of foreign journalists. We are obtaining outpasses for them and tickets to travel home," Al Mansouri said.

He accused Sharla of exploiting the women staying in her villa.

"She is living a life of luxury," he said.

A senior police official said there were a number of cases filed against Sharla.

"We are investigating the accusations against her," he said.

Two Uzbek victims, aged 26 and 21, told Gulf News they suffered at the hands of Sharla. The women, now being looked after at DFWC, said they arrived in Dubai in January en route to Turkey.

"One of our friends back home asked us to contact someone she knew when we arrived in Dubai. The woman came to the airport and told us we could stay at her house. She also obtained visas for us.

"The same day she took us to a beauty salon and later to a nightclub but when we refused to enter she slapped us severely. At that point we discovered we were victims of human trafficking.

"We ran away from the nightclub and headed back to the airport, where we stayed inside a mosque for two days without any food or money. Luckily an Emirati man found us crying. He helped us and took us to our consulate."

The consulate tried to find a place for the two women to stay until they obtained outpasses and tickets home. In the meantime, they were advised to stay with a woman called Sharla.

"The day we arrived she brought a well-known US media organisation representative to meet us. She took $4,000 in return for our stories. Sharla told us to say our country was poor and that Dubai was also a bad place.

Shout and scream

"We never spoke to the media. Sharla talked to them on our behalf and she spoke in English, which we couldn't understand. We kept begging her to let us go to our consulate. But she refused until one night, a month later, we ran away.

The women said Sharla treated them as her servants. We used to wash her clothes and make her coffee.

"She used to shout and scream at us all the time."

Consul General Madaev described the incident as "a very serious matter."

"When the two girls came to us it was late at night and we were advised to send them to this woman. Unfortunately, Sharla took them and disappeared from sight. We contacted her the next day and asked why she had sold their stories to several newspapers but she said they [the women] were happy and making money.

"We tried to contact Sharla several times after that in an effort to bring them back. but our attempts were in vain. One day we sent someone to the villa and threatened to contact the police."

An activist at an international organisation told Gulf News about another of Sharla's victims, a Russian woman whose newborn baby was sold to a British family.

The woman, now in a Dubai jail awaiting deportation, said she was pregnant with an illegitimate child during her stay at the City of Hope. Within days of giving birth Sharla had sold the baby. Police are investigating.

A Ugandan woman at DFWC, who stayed at the City of Hope for two years, said Sharla used her and her daughter.

"Sharla forced me to talk with foreign media organisations. I was told in advance what I should say. Sharla said she was a high-profile woman and threatened to send us to jail if we spoke out about what was happening."

Del wrote:Speedhump wrote:
Sharla Musabeh


I used to know her...

Chocoholic wrote:Unfortunately it is a big problem, but when you have the Chief of Police who openly admits to and condones wife beating (as per and article printed last year), then what are you to do about it.

There was a women's refuge, but it seems to have suffered some issues, so not sure if it is still operational.

Speedhump wrote:In order to be fair, here is another slant on the story. the shelter was (is?) called City of Hope:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/world ... wanted=all

Voice for Abused Women Upsets Dubai Patriarchy

By ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: March 23, 2008

Correction Appended

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — For years, Sharla Musabih has fought a lonely battle to protect battered wives and victims of human trafficking here. She founded the Emirates’ first women’s shelter here and she became a familiar figure at police stations, relentlessly hounding officers to be tougher on abusive husbands.

Ms. Musabih with a shelter resident’s child. Her aggressiveness stands out, as does her habit of calling her charges “darlin’.”

She has also earned many enemies. Emiratis do not often take kindly to rights advocates drawing attention to the dark side of their fast-growing city-state on the Persian Gulf, better known for its gleaming office towers and artificial islands.

Still, no one was quite prepared for the stories that started appearing in Dubai newspapers this month. Suddenly, unidentified female victims were coming forward to say that “Mama Sharla” herself had abused them, forced them to work as servants and sold their stories to foreign journalists for thousands of dollars, pocketing the proceeds. She even sold one woman’s baby, the articles said, hinting at criminal investigations.

To Ms. Musabih and her supporters, the accusations, which appear to be baseless, are the latest chapter in a long campaign of threats and defamation that began with angry husbands and has grown to include prominent clerics, and even the directors of a new government-financed women’s shelter, who, she says, would like to silence her.

The ferocity of the dispute is unusual for Dubai, and underscores a major challenge facing this proudly apolitical business capital. The city’s few rights advocates have always been quietly shunted aside. But as the conservative Muslim ethos of Dubai’s native Arab minority rubs against the varied perspectives of a much larger foreign population, debates about how to approach taboo subjects like domestic violence and the city’s prevalent prostitution are getting louder.

Battling Tradition

Ms. Musabih, 47, a boisterous American transplant who was born and raised on Bainbridge Island, Wash., argues that confrontation is essential in fighting any attitudes that make domestic abuse possible. She and her supporters also say the Emirates have not acknowledged the severity of their problem with human trafficking, the brutal business in which foreign women are lured here with promises of jobs and then forced into prostitution or servitude. Last year the United States State Department placed the Emirates and 31 other countries on a watch list for failing to effectively combat the illegal trade.

“When a woman has three broken bones in her back, and the police don’t take it seriously, yes, I get angry,” Ms. Musabih said.

Others say Ms. Musabih’s aggressive approach — which includes appeals to foreign news media as well as tough, face-to-face lobbying — is inappropriate in the Arab world, and has needlessly fueled the backlash she now faces. That assertiveness may also have made it easier to dismiss her as an outsider. Although she has lived here for 24 years, converted to Islam, is an Emirati citizen, wears a veil and has raised six children here with her Emirati husband, Ms. Musabih is still unmistakably American, from her moralistic zeal to her habit of calling the women in her shelter “darlin’.”

“I have told her sometimes I think she is wrong, she goes too far,” said Lt. Gen. Dahi al-Khalfan, the chief of the Dubai Police, who has supported Ms. Musabih in the past but now tends to criticize her work as divisive. “There is a case between husband and wife; let the court decide! Leave it.”

Safety and a Ticket Home

Ms. Musabih dates her work as an advocate from 1991, when she started tracking domestic violence cases and offering women shelter in her home in Dubai. In 2001, she rented a two-story house in the Jumeira district and opened a shelter for abused women and their children, naming it City of Hope.

On a recent afternoon, children’s toys littered the floors in the shelter’s sunlit living room, and several women snacked in the kitchen, while others sprawled on couches watching television upstairs. Although Ms. Musabih has had some dedicated assistants over the years, it is basically a one-woman show; she deals with everything from belligerent former husbands to buying plane tickets, sometimes with her own money, for foreign women to return to their home countries.

“I’ve repatriated 400 victims in the past six months,” said Ms. Musabih, a fast-talking, energetic figure who presides over the shelter like an overworked mother.

Establishing the shelter was unusual enough in the Arab world, where going outside the family to resolve domestic conflicts has little basis in law or custom. Ms. Musabih’s personal advocacy made her work even more startling. She would counsel women to leave their husbands if they were being beaten, and help represent them in courts or foreign consulates.

She would also march into police stations and yell at officers if she felt they were not protecting women in danger. In the Arab world it is virtually unheard of for a woman to behave this way toward a man, and the officers sometimes felt they had been publicly humiliated.

Some women who have spent time in the shelter say this tough approach is necessary. The police in Dubai “won’t do anything to protect you while you’re legally married,” said one former resident of the shelter, who declined to give her name because she still fears repercussions, from her husband and from others who oppose Ms. Musabih.

After her husband beat her repeatedly, the woman said, she appealed to the police, who made her husband sign a promise that he would not do it again. He violated the pledge again and again, she said, but the police did nothing, even after he broke into another house where she was seeking refuge and raped her.

“The police told me, ‘We can’t do anything, he’s your husband,’ ” she said.

But Ms. Musabih’s approach clearly shocked and angered many, and not just the husbands whose wives found shelter.

A prominent cleric, Ahmed al-Kobeissi, recently gave interviews to Dubai newspapers in which he said Ms. Musabih’s work “goes against the traditions of Emirati people” because she “instigates wives against their husbands.” Mr. Kobeissi also voiced indignation at Ms. Musabih’s suggestion that Emirati men are among the clients of Dubai’s many prostitutes.

Ms. Musabih’s work took on a higher public profile when she joined a crusade against the practice of using children, some as young as 4, as camel jockeys, once common in the Persian Gulf. Her advocacy led to a number of television and newspaper reports about the horrific abuses practiced on young jockeys, and appears to have helped lead to a ban on the practice in the Emirates in 2005.

Ms. Musabih is full of praise for the Emirati government’s response on this issue, and says it responded quickly and effectively to her appeals to change the laws. But her highly public approach to the problem is said to have angered some influential Emiratis, who felt she had embarrassed the leadership instead of allowing the matter to be settled quietly.

In the early spring of 2007, government officials approached Ms. Musabih about plans for a new state-sanctioned women’s shelter, apparently intended to replace hers. At first she welcomed the idea, because her shelter was often crowded and she was struggling to manage financially. They praised her pioneering work and said she could help direct the new shelter as a board member.

As the project evolved, it became clear that the government’s approach was vastly different from Ms. Musabih’s. It hired a director with a background in management and a more subdued style. On the grounds of an old rehabilitation center 20 minutes from Dubai with high fences and guards, the new shelter, known as the Dubai Foundation for Women and Children, resembles an American low-security prison.

Ahmed al-Mansouri, the chairman of the foundation’s board, says there was a need for a more organized approach and a shelter that, unlike Ms. Musabih’s, was licensed by the government. He says she was not making adequate progress on the legal cases of the women in her shelter, a claim she vehemently disputes. He also describes the familial chaos of the City of Hope shelter as a “horrible way of living.”

Certainly, the new shelter is more spacious, and has better access to schooling for the women’s children.

Feeling of Betrayal

In October, buses arrived at City of Hope and they moved 35 women to the foundation shelter.

But Ms. Musabih soon began to feel that the directors of the new shelter had betrayed her and were negligent with the women in some cases, a claim the foundation denies. She says the foundation was more interested in getting foreign women back to their home countries with a minimum of embarrassment, than in investigating wrongs that had been done to them and preventing those wrongs from recurring.

If the new shelter was meant to replace Ms. Musabih and quiet her down, it became clear over the following months that it would not work. City of Hope continued to take in new women, and as Ms. Musabih kept criticizing the Dubai Foundation’s approach, her relations with its directors became steadily nastier.

When one of the women who was moved to the foundation tried to commit suicide in December, Ms. Musabih accused its staff of negligence. After a heated exchange, the foundation’s director, Afra al-Basti, sued Ms. Musabih for slander.

It was then that the scandalous articles about Ms. Musabih began appearing in Dubai newspapers.

The sources for those articles appear to have been women at the foundation shelter who, like some of their counterparts at the City of Hope, are vulnerable or unstable, and have been drawn into the dispute boiling around them. Some speak no English or Arabic, and are easily manipulated. How exactly they came to spread false stories about Ms. Musabih’s selling babies or taking thousands of dollars from foreign journalists is still not clear.

Ms. Musabih, speaking by phone from Ethiopia, where she is setting up a shelter, said she felt betrayed.

“I never thought it would go this far,” she said. “These people think I’m an enemy of the state and that I need to be controlled.”

But even some of her supporters wonder whether Ms. Musabih, for all her pioneering accomplishments, could not have avoided all the ugliness if she had been willing to do things more quietly.

“With Sharla, it is ‘No, I am right,’ and she always deals with people straight on,” said Awatif Badreddine, a supervisor at City of Hope. “But I tell her you have to deal with people differently here. The Arabs don’t like this. Sometimes you have to go around to get what you want.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 30, 2008
An article last Sunday about Sharla Musabih and her efforts to protect battered wives and victims of human trafficking in Dubai paraphrased incorrectly from her comment about the need to take strong action to protect women. She said she was fighting any attitudes that made domestic abuse possible; she did not say that she was fighting patriarchal Arab traditions.

gamercowboy wrote:FTD, I commend you for your efforts. I really wish there were more people like you in Dubai. Someone wiser than me once said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing".

Speedhump wrote:gamercowboy wrote:
FTD, I commend you for your efforts. I really wish there were more people like you in Dubai. Someone wiser than me once said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing".


I should of course have said that too, well said gamercowboy, and bravo FTD.

I stopped someone's mugging once in London and got stabbed for it. I'd do it again though Very Happy

bushra21 wrote:check ur inbox

pcenedella wrote:please have victims contact us directly at www.uaelawdirectory.com

rudeboy wrote:simple get a divorce if he treats you bad, walk out and go back to your parents or find some next dude Very Happy

kanelli wrote:I think it is great that you got involved, but just be careful if the guy looks like he could really snap. If the woman comes to your house and he follows, he might try to harm all of you. It is so hard when you want to help someone but might also be putting yourself at risk. That's why I admire what you did. Let's hope the woman gets out and gets help. At least she knows others care and are willing to help her, even if the police won't do anything.

The difference in the news articles is interesting to say the least...

kanelli wrote:rudeboy wrote:
simple get a divorce if he treats you bad, walk out and go back to your parents or find some next dude Very Happy


Yeah, it is that easy... Rolling Eyes

What if her parents won't take her in because they are embarrassed that the community will think ill of them because their daughter is divorcing? What if they think that a man has the right to hit is wife sometimes, because wives need to be kept in line? Where is her support?

What if the couple are from different countries, living in a third country, and the abused wife has no job because she is raising children... She can grab some money and leave, but it is likely the husband would notice a large sum of money spent on airline tickets, and she may not even get out of the country with her children. Even if she makes it out, there would be an international custody battle and where would she get the money to pay the lawyers? How would she feed her children?

Many women become so submissive and have been conditioned by their abusers to accept what happens to them. It is hard for them to break away. If the husband keeps apologising and coming back to her with gifts and good behaviour for a short time, she stays and keeps trying to "work on" things, even when he isn't doing any work on his anger and violence issues.

How about the fact that a violent husband might even kill his wife for leaving, as has happened to many women.

The issue isn't as simple as it sounds.