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Pastimes : Desire And Grief -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HG who wrote (342)	10/28/2001 2:40:28 PM
From: HG	Respond to of 1595

Desperation drives Afghan women to prostitution Agencies Quetta, October 27: It's not hard finding customers. Yasmeen simply walks slowly through a stretch of the bazaar that's known as an area where women are bought and sold, just like the goods tacked in market stalls around them. Yasmeen is an Afghan refugee, a mother of eight children, and knows of no way other than prostitution that she can feed her family. In Pakistan, the number of women like her is growing as the war in Afghanistan sends desperate refugees flooding across the border. In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, prostitution is an offence punishable by death. Women convicted of selling sex have been publicly hanged by Taliban authorities, still clad in the all-enveloping burqas women are forced to wear. Across the border, the price the women pay is more subtle: humiliation, fear, disease, and the knowledge that once this life is embarked upon, there is no turning back. "I can never be anything else now," said Yasmeen, a plump dark-eyed woman in her late 20s, who stroked the hair of her baby boy as she talked. "This is the only life I have." Although fearful, she agreed to be interviewed after a series of contacts through intermediaries, on condition of anonymity. During a meeting at the home of a friend in a poor district of the frontier city of Quetta, she continually glanced nervously through the half-open door at those passing on the street outside. In Pakistan, a woman deemed to have dishonoured her family- which could involve something as innocent as a perceived flirtation with a man - risks death at the hand of male relatives.