Iraqi women are the latest group of Arab women to face virginity tests, a report by AFP said on Sunday. According to the report, husbands are taking their wives to a government facility to “ensure” their wives are virgins before consummating the marriage.
A lawyer in the country told the French press agency that the court-ordered tests more often than not show that the women were virgins until marriage, but it shames them nonetheless.
The report added that a government institute carries out the tests.
“Most of the cases we received after the first day of marriage,” said Dr Munjid al-Rezali, the director of the MLI, told AFP.
“The husband claim that she is not a virgin, and then the family bring her here, through the courts, this all come through the courts, and we examine her,” Rezali said, speaking in English.
“It’s not uncommon, we are seeing a lot,” he added.
Doctors also said they often test the husband for impotency, arguing that sometimes male Iraqis will claim their wife is not a virgin in order to cover up the shame of being impotent or having erectile dysfunction.
The report has left many Iraqi women’s advocates in a frenzy of anger. In Dubai, Iraqi university student Rania told Bikyamasr.com that “this is the most degrading thing I have heard of in Iraq in recent years. I just want to throw up.”
For her, the idea that a marriage, if based on love, can be torn apart because of one’s past is ridiculous.
“We know the men in the country are having sex and the idea that women have to be pure and innocent when they get married is so appalling, but this is our current society we live in,” she added.
The Arab world is no stranger to virginity tests, with Egyptian female activists being forced by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces last year of similar “tests” by military doctors.
In March last year, women activists arrested by the army were forced, in front of dozens of other soldiers, to take down their pants and allow a doctor to examine them.
When Samira Ibrahim – the woman who took the case to court – was asked for the procedure to be done in private, she was assaulted, she said.
The military court had been charged the doctor of committing a “crime against modesty,” and “negligence of the obedience of the military orders.” But they were let off the hook.
Local groups condemned the continued protection of the leaders and members of the armed forces from any accountability for crimes committed against civilians over the past 17 months.
Ibrahim told Bikyamasr.com that no women’s group had come forward to offer her and the other girls subjected to the tests assistance.
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