Saudi Arabia’s secretive rehabilitation ‘prisons’ for disobedient women

[IwantToRetire]

Girls and young women describe facing flogging and abuse in so-called ‘care homes’ after arguing with their fathers or husbands

... While Saudi Arabia celebrates being awarded the Fifa men’s World Cup and meticulously promotes itself on the global stage as reformed, women who have dared to publicly call for more rights and freedoms have faced house arrest, jail and exile. Activists say the country’s care homes are one of the regime’s lesser-known tools for controlling and punishing women, and want them to be abolished.

Saudi officials have described the care homes, which were set up across the country in the 1960s, as providing “shelter for girls accused or convicted of various crimes” and say they are used to “rehabilitate the female inmates” with the help of psychiatrists “in order to return them to their family”.

But Sarah Al-Yahia, who started a campaign to abolish the care homes, has spoken to a number of girls who describe an abusive regime, with inmates subjected to strip-searches and virginity tests on arrival and given sedatives to put them to sleep. ...

Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/may/28/saudi-arabia-women-girls-rehabilitation-prisons-dar-al-reaya

See also:

UK parliamentarians urge Foreign Secretary to advocate for al-Otaibi sisters in Saudi Arabia
https://alqst.org/en/post/uk-parliamentarians-urge-foreign-secretary-to-advocate-for-al-otaibi-sisters-in-saudi-arabia

Yes I read this. Just horrifying. When I read the bland government statement I felt quite frightened of what could happen to women and be hidden.

Maryam Aldossari, a Saudi activist based in London, says: “A young girl or woman will stay in there for as long as it takes for her to accept the rules.”

It's so sinister and barbaric.

terrifying and unsurprising

as long as the money is great, who cares about the human suffering 🥺

I partly posted because this has been written about before but if you read the article in full there is the gross hypocrasy of sport happily collaborating with Saudi Arabia.

And many sports fans from the UK happy to go there for sporting events.

Men who go there are agreeing that women are lower than dirt. #NiceGuy time to shine (and boycott).

Absolutely revolting, what backwards and lowlife men they are. I judge anyone who holidays in that human rights hellhole harshly.

Horrifying. However, this is not just a female problem or a new problem, human rights for everyone in Saudi Arabia are known to be poor. Unfortunately, this isn’t really that shocking

However, this is the Feminism subforum, formerly known as Feminism and Women’s Rights. And the OP has an article specifically about the patriarchal abuse of power to restrict and harm women and girls. Whether that oppression is through family or societal structures, I would hope that women can be concerned about other women without always having to take on the burden of everyone else as well.

It always sickens me that world leaders like Trump and Starmer bow down the Saudis purely because the Saudis gained a lot of money through oil.
They're basically backwards-minded desert people, but because they have oil we have to respect them.

It’s dystopian. Like PP’s I can’t believe FIFA are having anything to do with Saudi Arabia

WTAF?

I'm beginning to wonder if in fact MNHQ has achieved its long term aim by splitting FWR into the "Feminist Chat" for those who aren't every angry about women's rights being undermined or instituational violence against women, was an attempt to make this a single issue forum so that the feminism is gradually seeping away.

As MNHQ split the FWR just because a very few got upset by women being angry (which isn't very "nice"), maybe its time to tell MNHQ a more accurate label would be Women's Sex Based Rights Feminism.

And their mislabelling is not only misleading but denying us the right to be overtly who we are. Feminists whose analysis is based on women's sex based rights, who may currently being caught up in opposing TRAs because of their persistent activism, but without losing our support for women who are oppressed by other forms a patriarchal rights dominating society.

Horrendous if not surprising - Exerting power over /socially policing women in this way exists as a threat and means of control in many societies, indeed the western world have only recently given up similar systems

This was one of the functions served by Magdalene laundries, some mother and baby homes, poorhouses, workhouses, asylums - women and girls could be committed to them (under the guise of help) and therefore policed/controlled and effectively buried from society, labelled 'difficult/out of control women' their autonomy stripped from them and their behaviour/interactions policed. The thread that links a Georgian husband comitting his wife to an insane asylum, to a girl in the 1920s being committed to an institution for promiscuity/pregnancy out of wedlock, to the patients of William Sargant in the 1960s https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/29/he-still-features-in-my-nightmares-how-a-sinister-psychiatrist-put-hundreds-of-women-in-deep-drug-induced-comas is the same old male control, patriarchal social structure and misogyny - where states and societies use social control (backed up by religious, psychiatric and medical systems) as a means to manage female behavior. The threat of being put into the system chills the behaviour of many, and there is a mechanism in place for picking off the 'tall poppies' eg outspoken women who might organise/lead others, or show a different example - as shown by many of the women currently arbitrarily imprisoned in Saudi

How did we change our society so much that we now see things, accepted into the 1970s, 80s even as completely unacceptable, to the point where we have dismantled these structures and are investigating/compensating/providing resitution in some cases? I suppose the sea change was the declining influence of religion, a liberalising of cultural norms and a recognition of universal human rights? And yet the underlying thread continues: the same mechanisms of social control are still lurking there online, males taking over spaces and differentially policing womens speech and behaviour by shaming, banning, control if you deviate from the accepted norms, attempts to involve the police service and law to control and demand compliance.

If there were corrective centres being set up for a rebellious ethnic or racial group, there would be international concern. But because this is happening to women, Saudi Arabia is allowed to take its place on the world stage. It's such a sad reflection.

There was a thread on this article a while back
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5304739-5304739-he-still-features-in-my-nightmares-how-a-sinister-psychiatrist-put-hundreds-of-women-in-deep-drug-induced-comas

Great post @Didactylos . It’s stayed with me all day

Me as well. Brilliant post.