Tel-Chai Nation

The Jerusalem Post wrote about Haredis who've obtained services with prostitutes at the expense of their families when they're married:

“It is customary to think prostitution does not exist among religious men and women, but I want to say it certainly does,” said Debbie Gross, director of the Tahel Crisis Center for Religious Women and Children.

Gross, who has received many requests from girls and women who have fallen into prostitution or whose spouses go to prostitutes, gave some examples.

“A woman turned to us, A., a religious woman in her 40s, married and a mother of several children,” she said, at the Kolech Religious Women’s Forum in Jerusalem on Wednesday during a session devoted to the war on prostitution. “She has a family as standard as any other, loving and caring. No one has prepared for the difficult day in her life when she will find out that her beloved husband has been going to brothels for several years and using the services of escorts.

“Amid a mixture of feelings of guilt, disgust and a sense of betrayal, she sought someone who could help her. And this is how she got to us. She could not even honestly speak with her husband on her own, let alone consult lawyers regarding her rights or her thoughts of blood tests to rule out whether she contracted any sexually transmitted diseases.”

Very sad. Even worse, however, is when sexual assault occurs within the community:

Another case, which Gross said is representative of a widespread phenomenon, was of “an ultra-Orthodox girl from Bnei Brak who had difficulty fitting in with the haredi lifestyle and got into a relationship with an ultra-Orthodox boy from the neighborhood. After several meetings, he raped her, and the only person with whom she could share her tragedy was a good friend of hers.

“At some point, the story came out and got to school and to the girl’s parents. The results were to be expected: Sara [not her real name] was thrown out of school and [then] left home after she could no longer bear the fact that her parents blamed her for the rape, of which she’d been the victim.”

This was only the beginning of Sara’s story. Out on the street, it was no better, and Sara eventually started working as a prostitute.

Her feeling that she had indeed become a “whore” only came after a long time, during which she was raped and exploited horribly, Gross said. “And then she turned to us.”

This is far more abominable, when victim-blaming becomes the norm, but it's still unclear whether Haredi community leaders are demanding parents stop doing it and start calling for justice to be meted out against the rapists. Unless they do it publicly, there won't be any improvement.

Labels: haredi corruption, Israel, misogyny, Moonbattery