After her husband moved to Saudi Arabia for work, Fadya Salman, 27, began sending him naked photos of herself from her home in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen.
It wasn't the same as being together, but she helped them keep their bond alive.
After her, they stole her phone.
The thief threatened to post the photos online unless Salman – whose name, like other sources, has been changed here to protect his safety – came out with him.
He had become a victim of what authorities call
sextortion
, the act of threatening to share explicit or nude images unless sexual or money demands are met.
Salman refused.
Eventually, his family found out what happened and, in 2022, she was murdered.
A childhood friend, who asked that her name not be revealed, claims that her younger brother had killed her, pressured by her father into an alleged honor crime.
A Yemeni criminal investigation officer confirmed that she had been murdered, although no charges have been filed, as is often the case with these types of crimes.
“It was a nightmare,” the friend says, trying to describe Salman's ordeal.
“When a woman finds herself in a situation like this, she is alone.
She can't trust anyone to help her.
She cannot go to a male relative because she will assume that she is to blame, and another woman cannot help her.”
Sextortion
is becoming a global crisis, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its international law enforcement agency warned last year
.
Deep-rooted patriarchal traditions have made women in the Middle East and North Africa especially vulnerable to this blackmail.
Although most cases are never reported to authorities, a 2019 survey by Transparency International found that one in five people interviewed in Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine had been subjected to
sextortion
or knew someone who had been, one of the worst rates in the world.
When a woman finds herself in a situation like this, she is alone.
She can't trust anyone to help her.
She can't go to a male relative because he will assume she is to blame, and another woman can't help her.
The friend of a young Yemeni woman murdered after suffering sexual extortion
Widespread social attitudes that place the burden of preserving family honor on women often prevent victims from seeking justice.
And as in the case of Salman, blackmail can have tragic consequences.
These strict social codes are especially harsh in Yemen, which ranked last on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index for 15 consecutive years (from 2006 to 2020) and has a turbulent history of so-called honor killings.
Amaal Aldobai, Yemeni women's rights activist and director of the Center to Combat Violence against Women, emphasizes: “If a woman is a victim of
sextortion
, she cannot tell her family because she will be sentenced to death instead.” to do him justice.”
Divorces, murders and suicides
While some women are persuaded to send private images with promises of marriage, Yemeni activist Mokhtar Abdel Moez says most are victims of gangs who hack into women's phones and coerce them into prostitution or paying large sums of money. .
“This gives rise to hundreds of cases of divorce, murder and suicide every year,” he explains.
“In some cases, women give in to coercion and are forced into prostitution to avoid the publication of images that are not even scandalous and yet are enough to provoke their murder simply for being in the possession of a man.” strange".
Moez is the founder of Sanad, a Yemeni nonprofit that supports victims of cybercrime through a network of about 400 volunteers, who try to identify extortionists and convince them to delete images.
When he created the group in March 2020, Moez did not expect to find so many cases of
sextortion
, but he has already received about 17,000 complaints, 6,000 of them last year.
He estimates that about one in four are cases of
sextortion
.
The official figures are much lower.
An Interior Ministry official in the Houthi-led government in Sana'a, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, states that 114 electronic crimes, including sextortion, were reported in
2022
.
Yemen's Saudi-backed administration in Aden does not keep a tally of reported
sextortion
cases — most of them against women — but several officials acknowledge receiving dozens of such complaints.
In Egypt, activist Mohamed El-Yamani launched a network called Qawem (“resist” in Spanish) in 2020, after a young woman took her own life for fear that her ex-boyfriend would reveal private images.
Egypt ranks 134 out of 146 on the Global Gender Gap Index, and El-Yamani says his group has received reports of more than 100,000 cases of
sextortion
since it began, but he believes this is only a small part of the crimes committed.
El-Yamani claims that Qawem has successfully intervened in 4,000 cases, using a network of volunteers to deter blackmailers by tracking their location and threatening to expose their actions to their family, friends and colleagues.
Knowing that the victim has support is usually enough to deter blackmailers, but if not, the activist encourages women to report the perpetrators to the authorities.
In one case, El-Yamani says, someone posted online images of a girl from an important Egyptian family in which she appeared without a headscarf.
The girl had refused to comply with the demands of her blackmailer, who wanted money and video calls with her.
When the content was published, she was accused of recklessness and forced to stay home from school.
According to El-Yamani, Qawem managed to calm the situation by locating the blackmailer and getting him to apologize and remove the content, and convinced the girl's father to allow her to return to school.
Experts say the patriarchal nature of family relationships in some Middle Eastern countries has contributed to the problem.
Egypt, explains El-Yamani, is a regional leader in the fight against this problem.
Authorities have created digital investigation units across the country to deal with these types of crimes, and have passed laws to ensure that the identities of victims who report remain hidden.
Interventions like Qawem's would be much more difficult in countries like Yemen and Syria, he acknowledges.
“Many women in these countries would prefer to deal with their
sextors
in secret, regardless of the consequences, as their families would hold them responsible for not protecting their family's honor,” says El-Yamani.
Experts say the patriarchal nature of family relationships in some Middle Eastern countries has contributed to the problem.
“A common factor in the 3,657 cases that have reached us is the blind trust of the victims in the aggressor, because they lack the feeling of feeling loved and embraced in their own environment,” says Zainab al-Aasi, a Syrian psychiatrist and Founder of a non-profit organization called Gardenia that offers legal and mental support to victims of
sextortion
.
There are no laws in Yemen that cover
sextortion
, explains Fawzia el-Meressi, a board member of the Yemeni Women's Union, a nonprofit organization.
Even if there were, she maintains, these crimes would still exist;
They are the consequence of a patriarchal system that “creates an enormous void between the woman and the male members of her family, which criminals exploit.”
Omaima, 21, contacted a man online who a friend introduced to her as a researcher for a women's health organization.
The man offered to pay her if she provided him with information about her life, an attractive offer in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, where 80% of the population depends on humanitarian aid.
At first, Ella Omaima responded to questions she sent him on WhatsApp, sharing details about her relationship with her husband and photos of herself without a headscarf, a taboo in the strict Muslim society of which she is a part. her.
Later, her questions began to be sexual in nature, which made her uncomfortable.
When she began to ignore him, the man threatened to send her photos to her husband, and she followed through on his threat when she refused to listen to him.
Her husband divorced her.
“He didn't even listen to me,” Omaima says.
This report was originally published in English by
The Fuller Project,
in collaboration with
Foreign Policy, and
with Egab, a platform that works with journalists from the Middle East and Africa.
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