Muslim United Arab Emirates
Abused women find refuge in controversial UAE shelter
Friday, May 19, 2006
By Ali Khalil
Veiled Sharla says she is aware of many campaigns to distort the image of the
shelter, mainly by ‘abusive husbands of women who were helped by the shelter’
SHARLA’S mobile phone hardly stops alerting her with messages from women victims
of domestic violence seeking help or refuge in the Dubai-based shelter she runs.
Some sound very desperate. “Help me find a place to stay. This mentality isn’t
right ... There is no respect at all,” said a message from an American woman who
has been married for some 20 years to an Emirati.
“Why am I letting him treat me like garbage? I’m under his feet,” the message
read.
Sharla Musabih, one of the directors of two shelters known as the City of Hope
is herself American and married to a local man.
She said the desperate mother of five is married to a wealthy man who “beats and
rapes her” and does not provide her with food despite housing her in a mansion.
Sharla said complaints have increased sharply since she started the shelter with
a group of Western women back in 2001.
“I used to get one case a month ... But for the past six months, I get at least
one case a day,” she told AFP.
Another message is from a caseworker informing her of a fellow American whose
abusive local husband told her a traditional midwife was coming to circumcise
her.
“He’s planning to tie up his wife, and cut (her clitoris) off,” the message
read, saying the woman, a Muslim convert in her mid-twenties and married for six
years, had run away.
Female genital mutilation (FGM), as it is referred to by human rights
organizations, is not common in the United Arab Emirates. Sharla said it was the
first time in her 25 years in the country that she has heard of such a
“shocking” case.
But for a Sunni cleric who sees the shelter going against the conservative
culture of the society, Sharla is a “suspect foreigner who is inciting women
against their husbands”.
“There are courts and law in this country. A woman who is being beaten by her
husband can file a lawsuit and the judge would divorce her,” Iraqi Sheikh Ahmad
al-Kubaisi said.
The UAE-based cleric said people are very wary of the role of the shelter,
claiming that some see it as a stop to traffic women into prostitution.
Veiled Sharla said she was aware of many campaigns to distort the image of the
shelter, mainly by “abusive husbands of women who were helped by the shelter”.
Kubaisi said marital problems should be sorted first through the family, and
government departments if needed, but not by running to a “suspect” shelter.
Sharla agreed that the first port of call for a woman subjected to domestic
violence should be the police’s human rights department, which usually refers
her to hospital for a medical report.
But she complained that human rights officers are generally not trained to deal
with cases of domestic violence. She said they tend to call in the husband of a
pleading wife, promising to make him sign a pledge not to abuse her again.
“That’s why most women don’t want to go to the police because that triples their
problems,” claimed Sharla, pointing out that women later suffer the revenge of a
husband who feels humiliated.
In court, women who demand divorce over domestic violence have to wait a long
time, even years.
“By the time a woman gets a divorce she is ready to give up all her rights
because she would have lost her mind,” she added.
A Muslim man can divorce his wife instantly without resorting to a court, but a
woman needs to have a strong case to convince the judge to grant her a divorce.
In one of the City of Hope shelters, located in a two-storey villa in an
affluent neighborhood of Dubai, a handful of women and several children shifted
between the small backyard and the living room.
The two shelters can accommodate around 80 women but they currently host a total
of 22 women, Sharla said, adding that donations in kind and money keep the
facility running.
The majority of women who seek help from the shelter are foreigners. They are
married either to local men or other Arabs, or subjected to violence from family
members. Some are abused domestic workers.
“Local women run to their mother’s house and they sort it out between families,”
said Sharla, pointing out that the shelter reflects the demographic diversity of
the UAE population of around four million, which is a patchwork of ethnicities
and nationalities.
A 22-year-old veiled Asian girl told AFP she ended up in the shelter after
repeated attempts to escape being abused by her family, which had confiscated
her passport and tried to force her into an arranged marriage.
“My mother and younger brother were violent with me, beating me with fists and
pulling my hair,” she said, requesting anonymity.
She had emigrated to a Western country, but when she came back to the United
Arab Emirates for a visit her family forced her to stay.
She said her country’s embassy refused to issue her a new passport to be able to
leave the UAE, telling her: “It is wrong to go against your family’s wishes.”
There are no independent statistics on violence against women in conservative
Gulf countries.
A conference on combating violence and discrimination against women held in
Manama in 2005 called on Gulf countries to establish a regional centre to
“collate regular statistics on violence against women”. AFP