Inside Saudi Arabia’s ‘hellish’ secret prisons for ‘disobedient’ women and girls where inmates are sent by families to be flogged and abused until they become docile… or jump off the roof to end it all

Saudi women have bravely spoken out on the ‘hellish’ conditions inside the country’s prisons for ‘disobedient’ women, where inmates are sent by family members to be ‘rehabilitated’ through an alleged violent campaign of flogging, isolation and abuse.

Sarah Al-Yahia, campaigning to abolish the homes, told the Guardian that her father had threatened to send her to a Dar al-Re’aya – literally ‘care homes’ – facility as a child ‘if I didn’t obey his sexual abuse’.

‘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 said.

Women may have to make the impossible choice between abuse at home and the gruelling conditions inside the camps, she explained.

Inside the facilities, they may be punished with solitary confinement and floggings unless they ‘reconcile’ with their abusers, the human rights group ALQST reported.

Within the facilities, the organisation has documented wider cases of abuse and neglect; malnutrition; poor health and hygiene; mistreatment and brutality; excessive use of solitary confinement; and denigration.

Several cases of suicide or attempted suicide have been reported in recent years.

The care homes have existed since the 1960s, initially presented as a rehabilitative ‘shelter’ for women accused or convicted of certain crimes. They hold women between the ages of 7 and 30.

But today, rights groups warn they serve primarily as detention facilities for young women and girls who have ‘become delinquent or have been accused by their male guardians of disobedience’.

Video from 2017 purports to show women trying to jump from the roof of a centre in Mecca

One young Saudi woman who fled into exile told the Guardian that the institutions are well known among women in the country.

‘It’s like hell,’ she said. ‘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.”

Sarah, now 38, said inmates have described being subjected to strip searches and virginity tests on arrival at the facilities, and given sedatives to put them to sleep.

She told the newspaper that women are addressed by numbers, not their names, and recalled one woman having received lashes for sharing their family name.

‘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.’

Harrowing video footage shows women climbing onto the roofs of facilities, trying to escape.

In 2015, a woman was found to have hanged herself from the ceiling of her room at one of the shelters, writing in a note: ‘I decided to die to escape hell.’

An inmate at the Makkah facility had said earlier: ‘Dying is more merciful than living in the shelter. 

‘Food, which is supposed to be the easiest thing to get, does not come easily.’

One former inmate told MBC in 2018 that she and others were made to eat their own vomit after throwing up bad food.

‘They let men in to hit us. Sometimes the girls and kids face sexual harassment, but if they talk, no one listens.’ 

A worker at another shelter was quoted as having said that children suffer the worst kind of psychological and physical torture.

‘With my own eyes I saw a worker beating on a child not more than 13 years of age,’ they said, reported by Arab News at the time.

Several cases of suicide or attempted suicide have been reported in recent years

While the kingdom publicly celebrates women’s empowerment, and chairs the UN’s gender equality body, ALQST warns that women’s rights supporters are systematically punished for their views, allowed out only when a man permits them.

Women have then reportedly been killed by abusive relatives soon after release.

One woman told the Guardian that she was taken to Dar al-Re’aya – literally ‘care homes’ – after complaining about her father and brothers. 

She was then allegedly abused at the institution and accused of bringing shame upon her family for her social media posts about women’s rights.

She was held in the institution until her father agreed she could be released, despite his being her alleged abuser, the outlet reports. 

Girls and women can only be released from Dar al-Re’aya into the custody of a male relative, ALQST reports.

If one is not willing or available, the authorities will move them to a similar ‘guest’ facility – from which they will also require a male guardian or relative.

Women who reach the age of 30 while still in Dar al-Re’aya are also transferred to a ‘guest’ facility, or Dar al-Theyafa.

Women fleeing abuse can essentially be left to spend their lives inside the camps, or face returning to abusive households. They may never leave.

Harrowing video footage shows women climbing onto the roofs of facilities, trying to escape

Conditions have scarcely changed in recent years, despite the kingdom’s efforts to welcome in Western visitors and appear more liberal.

In a 2021 ALQST report, women described being made to stand for six hours at a time by way of punishment for disobedience.

Women are said to be encouraged to reconcile with abusers, and resistance is met with harsh punishments including ‘regular floggings and solitary confinement’ until they concede.

In 2019, former inmate Kholoud Bariedah recounted her experience inside the prisons to Business Insider.

She said she was sent to the centre aged 19 after being sentenced in 2006 to 2,000 lashes with a whip and four years of detention for drinking alcohol at a party with single men she was not related to.

‘Girls held in isolated rooms start to go weird and hurt themselves — they destroy the lamps or, in another isolated room, a window, they smash glass and they start to hurt themselves’ with the shards, she told the outlet. 

Having since fled to Germany, she told Insider: ‘I knew that if I said any word about it in Saudi, I will go back to prison.’ 

Data is not often released on the facilities. In 2016, there were 233 girls and women held in seven facilities across the kingdom.

Officials announced in 2018 plans to rent five more spaces to allow for more detentions, in part to account for women breaking traffic laws after they were legally allowed to drive.

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