The worst places in the world for women: Somalia
Posted: Wed Jun 15, 2011 1:00 am
Fatima Osman Bulle lives in an internally displaced ppeople's camp in Mogadishu. Her makeshift house consists of cloths and sticks and has no running water, electricity or toilet. She and her husband, seven children and three relatives are crammed into one room.
"I feel that I am a low-class member of the family," Bulle says. "I am the most disrespected person in the home."
The 35-year-old has been sexually harassed, tortured and abducted by people she worked for in the past . She now earns $40 (£24) a month as a housemaid and cook.
"I started working as housemaid when I was eight, I was married by force when I was 13 and I am a victim of domestic violence since then," she says.
"The abuses start from early childhood. I was circumcised when I was five. It is a lifetime wound that I live with all the time. I experienced child labour and forced marriage and I never went into a class."
She cannot read or write and her children have been denied access to education. Their future is "dark", she says.
Domestic violence, constant fear of rape, lack of healthcare and basic needs and cultural inferiority are the reality for women in Somalia. They have no voice and little respect.
Fadumo Isaak Ahmed, 30, a mother of five, typifies the destitution and suffering of the women and children in her neighbourhood.
"I work and wash clothes for the families," she says. "I have no regular job. I look for my luck, but the amount I can generate can be one dollar or less.
"Three of my children go begging. They are street beggars. If they get some money, we can use it as the fuel of the hurricane lamp. If they don't get any, we sleep in the dark."
Ahmed has also experienced female genital mutilation, early marriage and child labour. She whispers: "My husband beats me when I don't get a job because he stays in the house and thinks that I am his slave. If I left him, I would have no place to go, so I am a life slave.
"It is the circumstances and the culture of the country that made me such a low-class person."
Ahmed grew up as an orphan and was forced to marry a cousin when she was 14. "He died when I got two children, and I was forced to marry his younger brother who is my husband now. He beats me all the time," she says.
"A man raped me when I was 13, and I was victimised by rapists two other times when my husband was absent."
She is worried about the future of her three daughters, who have no hope of going to school.
Violence against women in Somalia is the highest in Africa, according Mogadishu's Somali Women Development Centre, which provides support to victims.
Nadia Sufi Abdi, the centre's human rights documentation officer, describes the country as "a woman's hell on earth."
She says: "No woman in Somalia is happy to be a woman because, from the cradle to the grave, woman is a victim.
"The domestic violence, the raping, killing and kidnapping of women is part of the daily life, and there is no authority standing to stop this."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ju ... en-somalia
