[Picture from same article - copyright ipsnews.net,
02/01/2013 - Rebecca Murray/IPS]]
02.01.2013. Twenty-one-year-old Aisha
clings to her two children as she recounts her tale of horror. Growing up in
the Somali capital Mogadishu, she fell in love and bore a child out of wedlock
four years ago. When her family threatened her life for destroying her ‘honour’,
Aisha escaped.
She braved the hazardous journey with
smugglers across the Indian Ocean to Yemen, and to what she thought was a
better life.
Instead, Aisha now squats with four other
women in the sprawling, cinderblock slum of Basateen, in the eastern seaport
city of Aden. They beg for money in the shabby southern seaport every day,
often prostituting themselves for two dollars a trick. They split their meager
earnings with their controlling pimp. “I just want to go to a safer place for
my children,” Aisha sighs. “In another country.”
Human trafficking networks with
international reach are expanding in Yemen, and with poverty being a key
factor, sexually exploited women are the most vulnerable victims.
Bleak
as Aisha’s future may look, her fate is better than that of a 17-year-old
Ethiopian girl who died alone in a hospital in Haradh, near the Saudi Arabian
border.
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