Refugees prostituted by poverty

Sobah started working as a prostitute in Pakistan a month ago

Sobah started working as a prostitute in Pakistan a month ago. For the illiterate Afghan refugee who never before had a job, it was a quick way to earn money to care for her recently widowed mother and three young siblings.

She says her mother worries about her when she goes with clients but her family desperately needs her earnings to pay for the rented accommodation they share in a respectable suburb of the north-western city of Peshawar.

Sobah works for an older woman who charges her out for between 3,000 and 5,000 rupees a night: £45 to £75. Sobah keeps about two thirds of the fee, a substantial sum in a country where a teacher earns between 6,000 and 10,000 rupees a month. The monthly rent on her two room home is 4,000 rupees.

Sobah met her madame, who is a neighbour, shortly after her family fled from the Afghan capital Kabul last month in advance of the US airstrikes.

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She says: "She said to me 'at the moment you don't have any money to earn a living, do you want to do this?' and because I have a lot of money problems I accepted."

Sobah says she is one of six women working for the woman who contacts them by phone at their homes when she has a client for them.

It's impossible to recognise that this petite 20-year-old is a prostitute by how she is dressed. She looks just like any other local women in her traditional shalwar kamiz, a long dress worn over baggy trousers. Only her dark kohl-lined eyes are visible beneath the white scarf covering her head and narrow shoulders.

Once inside the hotel room, she removes the scarf to reveal her doll-like features and responds to questions in a quiet voice with the occasional nervous giggle. The nails on her left hand are painted silver and there are traces of glitter on her face.

Sobah says she works once or twice a week, spending the entire night with her clients in their homes or hotel rooms. She is on the pill and sometimes she uses condoms. Asked whether she is afraid of contracting AIDS or some other sexually transmitted disease she replies: "I'm very afraid. I try to protect myself against AIDS but sometimes I don't have condoms."

While some of the men she has been with have treated her roughly, Sobah says none have been violent. "If the men do it with me gently, I stay quiet. If they are rough I start to fight with them. I'm always afraid until I get back home."

Two or three of her clients have told her they will support her financially so she can stop working as a prostitute, she says.

"They say they will give me money every month but none of them have ever done this. They lied."

Sobah says she would not like to return to her country "because there's nothing in my country now. It's all destroyed so I want to go abroad. I know money will not give me happiness but it will solve my problems."

The stigma of being a prostitute is intense in this Muslim state where women are required to cover their bodies from head to foot and sex is not openly discussed. It is unacceptable, outside some cosmopolitan cities, for unmarried men and women to freely associate with each other in public.

Many of Peshawar's prostitutes are Afghan women who are considered more exotic than their local counterparts. There is no public red-light district in the city and most of the women work, like Sobah, from their homes.

Asked if she feels ashamed that she has to do this kind of work, Sobah replies: "Yes, of course, what do you think? If I find someone to give me food and money to survive I will not do this work. When I go with a man I don't do it with my heart. I just do it for money."

Sobah says her father was a fundamentalist Muslim and Taliban supporter who did not want his daughters to go to school. She can read the Koran in Arabic, but nothing else.

"If he was alive I wouldn't have to do this work. If he saw me do it, he would kill me," she says.