One mother's story shows plight of trapped women

LONDON — Gunfire cracked all around Sara Rogers as she climbed to the roof of her high-rise home in Gaza. The year was 2005, and Israeli soldiers were fighting Palestinian gunmen to stop rocket attacks and destroy smuggling tunnels.

Rogers closed her eyes. "Just let one hit me in the head," she begged. "And make it quick."

It was not the months of violence of the Second Intifada that made the Italian-American college graduate ache for death. It was her virtual enslavement by one of the most feared families in the Middle East.

-snip-

Rogers is not the first Western woman to marry an Arab man and find out how few rights she had once removed to a Middle East country that abides by sharia, or Islamic law. But some are working to make her among the last.

Micah Thorner, director of post-convention support programs at the Hague, said such cases will be the subject of a gathering in Tunisia this month "to engage states that are based on sharia legal systems in dialogue with states that are party to the convention."

Thorner said the aim is to get sharia nations to agree on some principles for the resolution of parental disputes involving children. But many nations in the Middle East have not signed on to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, an international agreement protecting against detainment of children.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/11/03/trapped-women-muslim-countries/3145559/