A lot can be said about the love that a mother and father have for their child. Most parents will declare the unconditional love that they had for all of their children to their very last breath and consider being a successful parent an incomparable achievement.
Sadly, though, this often inherently supreme love is by no means universal.
Perhaps one of the worst examples of Iraq's downhill slide into an abysmal chaos since the ousting of Saddam Hussein is the burgeoning and depressingly lucrative business of sex trafficking.
A recent and shockingly revealing story from Time magazine details the struggle of an undercover human rights activist, and former commodity of the market to raise awareness and a demand for action in halting what is nothing more than a modern day slave trade.
According to the story by Rania Abouzeid, poor and underprivileged Iraqi mothers are selling their preteen and teenage daughters into a "sex market," with prices ranging from $2,000 all the way up to $30,000, where they are driven into prostitution. While much of it takes place within local borders, there are many occurrences on an international level as well, particularly to Syria and Jordan.
Getting the girls across the border proves difficult at times, so most of their "managers" either give them fake passports or force them into marriage.
In the Islamic world, a young girl traveling with an older man will not draw any attention if it is her husband. But once safely arrived, they are divorced and then put to use.
The secretive nature of the whole business makes it almost impossible to account for. There is no official count of how many girls have fallen prey to the system, but involved activist groups estimate it to be in the tens of thousands.
The saddest and most repulsive aspect, though, is that it largely remains a "hidden crime." Abouzeid goes on to cite a report from the State Department saying the Iraqi government is basically ignoring everything, claiming that Baghdad "offers no protection services to victims of trafficking, reported no efforts to prevent trafficking in persons and does not acknowledge trafficking to be a problem in the country."
Nawal al-Samarraie, former Minister of Women's Affairs in Iraq, reinforces this statement, insisting that most of the girls are willingly participating.
What exactly goes through the mind of a mother who compels her to sell her child into slavery is beyond comprehension.
The turning-the-other-way of the Iraqi government is equally heartbreaking, doing nothing more than supplementing what has to be monumental feelings of abandonment and loneliness. What the answer is in all of this remains to be seen, at least until the Iraqis step up to the plate and recognize this problem, provided they ever do.
For the sake of every Iraqi girl, let's hope it's much sooner than later.
Jerrod Laber can be contacted at laber4@marshall.edu.
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