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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Tom Levitt and Deepa Parent

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

A woman in a niqab is superimposed on a background showing barred windows and a metal bed, with three illustrations: one of a hand holding a whip, one of a woman on top of a building and one of a woman alone in a stark bedroom.
Girls grow up fearing Saudi Arabia’s Dar al-Reaya, or ‘care homes’. Illustration: Anna Ivanenko/The Guardian

A young woman wearing a black abaya is pictured in a city in north-west Saudi Arabia standing precariously on a second-floor window ledge. A second photograph shows a group of men escorting her down with the help of a crane.

The woman’s identity is unknown, but she was allegedly being held at one of Saudi Arabia’s notoriously secretive “jails” for women banished by their families or husbands for disobedience, extramarital sexual relations or being absent from home.

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