Revealed: Saudi Arabia’s secretive rehabilitation ‘prisons’ for disobedient girls

A younger girl dressed in a black abaya is pictured in a town in north-west Saudi Arabia status precariously on a second-floor window ledge. A moment {photograph} displays a bunch of fellows escorting her down with the assistance of a crane.

The girl’s identification is unknown, however she was once allegedly being held at certainly one of Saudi Arabia’s notoriously secretive “jails” for girls banished via their households or husbands for disobedience, extramarital sexual members of the family or being absent from house.

It was once an extraordinary glimpse of the plight of loads or extra women and younger girls believed to be held in such amenities, the place they’re “rehabilitated” so they may be able to go back to their households.

Speaking out in public or sharing pictures of those “care homes”, or Dar al-Reaya, has turn out to be unattainable in a rustic the place voices on girls’s rights seem to have been silenced. But over the last six months, the Guardian has collected testimony about what it’s like inside of those establishments, described as “hellish”, with weekly floggings, pressured non secular teachings and no visits or touch with the out of doors international.

Conditions are reported to be so dangerous that there were a number of circumstances of suicide or tried suicide. The girls can spend years locked up, not able to go away with out the permission in their circle of relatives or a male mother or father.

“Every girl growing up in Saudi knows about Dar al-Reaya and how awful it is. It’s like hell. I tried to end my life when I found out I was going to be taken to one. I knew what happened to women there and thought ‘I can’t survive it’,” says one younger Saudi girl who later controlled to escape into exile.

Maryam Aldossari, a Saudi activist primarily based in London, says: “A young girl or woman will stay in there for as long as it takes for her to accept the rules.”

While Saudi Arabia celebrates being awarded the Fifa males’s World Cup and meticulously promotes itself at the world level as reformed, girls who’ve dared to publicly name for extra rights and freedoms have confronted space arrest, prison and exile. Activists say the the rustic’s care houses are one of the most regime’s lesser-known equipment for controlling and punishing girls, and need them to be abolished.

Saudi officers have described the care houses, that have been arrange around the nation within the 1960s, as offering “shelter for girls accused or convicted of various crimes” and say they’re used to “rehabilitate the female inmates” with the assistance of psychiatrists “in order to return them to their family”.

But Sarah Al-Yahia, who began a marketing campaign to abolish the care houses, has spoken to plenty of women who describe an abusive regime, with inmates subjected to strip-searches and virginity exams on arrival and given sedatives to place them to sleep.

“It is a prison, not a care home, as they like to call it. They call each other by numbers. ‘Number 35, come here.’ When one of the girls shared her family name, she got lashes. If she doesn’t pray, she gets lashes. If she is found alone with another woman she gets lashes and is accused of being a lesbian. The guards gather and watch when the girls are being lashed.”

Yahia, who’s now 38 and lives in exile, says her folks had threatened to ship her to Dar al-Reaya since she was once 13. “My father used it as a threat if I didn’t obey his sexual abuse,” she says, including that women and girls might face the scary predicament of deciding between Dar al-Reaya and staying in an abusive house.

“They make it impossible for others to help women fleeing abuse. I know a woman who was sentenced to six months in jail because she helped a victim of violence. Giving shelter in the case of a woman charged for ‘absenteeism’ is a crime in Saudi Arabia.

“If you are sexually abused or get pregnant by your brother or father you are the one sent to Dar al-Reaya to protect the family’s reputation,” she says.

Amina*, 25, says she sought shelter in a ‘care home’ in Buraydah, a town in central Saudi Arabia, after being overwhelmed via her father. She says the construction was once “old, crumbling and unsettling” and the team of workers “cold and unhelpful”. They belittled her revel in, says Amina, telling her different women had it “far worse” and had been “chained at home” and informed her to “thank God my situation wasn’t that bad”.

The subsequent day, team of workers summoned her father, says Amina, however did little to offer protection to her. “They asked both of us to write down our ‘conditions’. I requested not to be beaten or forced into marriage, and to be allowed to work. My father demanded that I respect everyone, never leave the house without permission, and always be accompanied by a male escort. I signed out of fear – I didn’t feel I had a choice.”

Once she returned house, Amina says the beatings endured and in any case she was once pressured to escape into exile. “I remember being utterly alone and terrified. I felt like a prisoner in my own home, with no one to protect me, no one to defend me. It felt like my life didn’t matter, like even if something terrible happened to me, no one would care,” she says.

For younger women, finding out to concern Dar al-Reaya begins from a tender age. Shams* says she was once 16 when a girl who have been in one of the most care houses was once dropped at her faculty. She informed the category that she had began a dating with a boy and was once stuck via the non secular police and made to admit to her father. After she was pregnant her circle of relatives disowned her and the daddy refused to permit her to marry, so she was once despatched to Dar al-Reaya. “She told us, if a woman has sex or a relationship she becomes a ‘cheap woman’. If you are a man you will always be a man, but if a woman makes herself cheap, she will be cheap for life.”

Layla*, who nonetheless lives within the nation, says she was once taken to Dar al-Reaya after complaining to the police about her father and brothers. She says they abused her after which accused her of bringing disgrace on her circle of relatives after she posted on social media about girls’s rights. She remained within the care house till her father agreed for her to be launched, despite the fact that he was once her alleged abuser.

“These women have no one. They could be abandoned for years, even without committing a crime,” says a Saudi girls’s rights activist who needs to stay nameless. “The only way out is through a male guardian, marriage or jumping off the building. Old men or former convicts who did not find a bride would look for a bride in these institutions. Some women would accept this as the only way out.”

Some Saudi males will say a girl merits to be there or that they must be grateful that the federal government supplies amenities to offer protection to them, says Fawzia al-Otaibi, an activist pressured to escape the rustic in 2022.

“No one dares tweet or speak about these places. No one will ask about you when you go there. They make the victims feel ashamed,” Otaibi says.

Activists say that if the Saudi regime had been desirous about girls’s rights they’d reform the care house machine and supply right kind secure shelters for sufferers of abuse. “There are women who have good families who do not abuse or hide them,” says a Saudi activist now dwelling in exile. “But many live under strict restrictions and suffer abuse silently. The state supports this abuse with these institutions. They only exist to discriminate against women. Why are the Saudi authorities allowing them to stay open?”

The human rights workforce ALQST says Dar al-Reaya amenities are infamous inside Saudi Arabia as state equipment for implementing gender norms and “stand in stark contrast to the Saudi authorities’ narrative of women’s empowerment”.