Um Majed’s cell phone rarely stops ringing these days. She calls herself a marriage broker; in reality, she sells Syrian girls to men looking for brides at bargain prices.
“Of course she’s thin,” she tells one client. “She’s been in a camp for a month.”
For many families living in Jordan’s refugee camps, selling their daughters into marriage is the only way to survive. Across the Middle East, it is the custom for the groom to pay the bride’s family, but their desperation is being exploited. Often the marriages are a sham, just a way to have sex. Some last only weeks.
Um Majed gets a cut for every match she makes. Young virgins fetch up to $5,000.
“You want me to get a younger one?” she asks one caller. “Thirteen, fourteen?”
Re: Syrians selling their daughters: Once upon a time there was a terrible Holocaust against the Jews.. I’ve heard stories from my own family about some Jews in Europe who threw their babies from the trains in the hopes a kind and righteous Gentile would find the baby and bring baby up as their own to spare child’s life.One of my aunts did that – an aunt I never met.. What is happening in Syria now is terrible but that is still no excuse to sell daughters. Just goes to show you how primitive these Arabs are… Also, its the Arab mentality that women are worth zero.
Sick to my stomach thinking about what those poor little girls go through.
sorry women are worth zero unless they sell her to a man then as we can see she has some worth Prostitution by parents…