分类： society

Eleven years of ongoing conflict have shattered economic stability and basic quality of life across Yemen, creating a stark gender divide in how people seek a way forward. While thousands of Yemeni men have migrated to Gulf Cooperation Council nations in search of stable work, Yemeni women face steep barriers to mobility: rigid patriarchal social norms and longstanding legal requirements mandate that a woman be accompanied by a male guardian (known locally as a mahram) for international travel, cutting off most independent migration options. For a growing number of young Yemeni women trapped in cycles of poverty and insecurity, marriage to a wealthy foreign man has emerged as one of the only viable paths to escape hardship and build a stable life outside the country – but the outcomes of these risky unions vary dramatically, from hard-won security to devastating exploitation.

Mona, a 29-year-old woman from Taiz governorate whose name has been changed to protect her safety, first experienced the crushing weight of Yemen’s crisis during her five-year marriage to a local shopkeeper. “Every single day I worried about how to put food, water, and basic services on the table,” she explained in an interview with Middle East Eye. After the birth of her child, the couple’s poverty deepened so severely that even affording infant formula became nearly impossible. “I couldn’t stay with a man who couldn’t even provide milk for his own child,” Mona said. She divorced her husband three years ago, vowing to never again marry into poverty.

Mona spent a year working casual jobs with a local humanitarian organization supporting vulnerable Yemeni families, but never met the wealthy partner she sought. It was only when a friend introduced her to a wealthy Emirati suitor that her path shifted – a match arranged by a hidden marriage broker who specialized in connecting Yemeni women to foreign grooms. Though Mona hesitated at learning the man already had a family in the UAE and the marriage would be a secret arrangement based in Egypt, she ultimately accepted the offer, convincing her traditionally-minded brothers (who had initially opposed any marriage outside the local tribe) by framing the union as a chance to lift the entire family out of poverty. “We all deserve a better life,” she said. “I couldn’t find that in Yemen, so this let me chase two dreams at once: a secure provider and a life outside the country.”

After negotiating terms online, Mona received a $10,000 dowry – three times the average dowry for a local Yemeni groom in her community – and traveled to Egypt with her father to formalize the marriage. Today, she resides in Egypt full-time, with her husband traveling regularly for work between global destinations. For Mona, the gamble has paid off: her husband provides generously, covering her living expenses and allowing her to send regular financial support back to her family in Yemen. “I truly feel I’ve achieved my dream,” she said.

But for 22-year-old Noha, the same path led only to heartbreak. Noha was a first-year university student when she began hearing classmates share stories of Yemeni women who found prosperity through marriage to foreign men. Raised by a single mother after her parents’ divorce, Noha had watched her mother struggle daily to provide for the family, and the promise of financial security and a new life abroad felt like an answer to her prayers. She and her mother reached out to a marriage broker, who connected her to a man in his 40s holding U.S. citizenship. Though the suitor was more than 20 years her senior, the promise of escape from Yemen’s war zone was too tempting to ignore. Noha’s father, who initially opposed the match, quickly agreed after receiving a financial incentive, and traveled with her to Egypt to finalize the wedding.

Within days of her father returning to Yemen, Noha realized she had been manipulated. “From the first week, he treated me like a commodity, not a wife,” she recalled. She soon discovered he was a serial marriage swindler, marrying multiple young Yemeni women each year for temporary relationships, with no intention of building a permanent life together. Trapped alone in a foreign country with no friends or relatives to turn to, Noha begged her father to rescue her. He returned to Egypt within a month and brought her back to Yemen, where she now lives again with her mother. Noha says the success stories she heard from classmates were entirely fabricated by profit-driven marriage brokers. “These foreign men don’t see Yemeni girls as people – they see us as products to use for a short time and then throw away,” she said. “I curse the day I ever thought this was a way to a better life.”

The desire to escape Yemen’s collapsing living conditions is widely shared among young Yemeni women, even for those who have not yet pursued a cross-border marriage. Twenty-year-old Mariam, a social media active young woman who also requested anonymity, says years of conflict have made it impossible to build a stable future in Yemen. “Every day all I hear from people in my community is complaints about how bad things are,” she said. “We only live once – we deserve the chance to enjoy it.” Like most Yemeni women, Mariam knows she cannot travel abroad without a male guardian, so marriage to a man who can relocate her outside the country is her primary goal. She has already rejected multiple local suitors who could not offer her that chance. “Life outside Yemen is like heaven, and I don’t want to raise my children here,” she said. “I’d marry a wealthy Yemeni or a foreign man – it doesn’t matter, as long as he can get me out.”

Sociologist Naif Nouraddin, who has studied the rise of cross-border marriages among young Yemeni women, says the trend is rooted in Yemen’s deepening economic and social collapse, driven by more than a decade of war. He notes that most women who pursue these unions come from households already fractured by crisis, often growing up in single-parent homes with little financial or emotional security. “These young women are chasing stability they can’t find at home, but more often than not, this path leads to another breakdown,” Nouraddin explained. “The vast majority of these foreign grooms are only seeking temporary marriages, and they end in divorce after just a few months.”

Nouraddin added that while widespread poverty is the main driving force, not all low-income Yemeni families accept these arrangements. Many hold fast to traditional norms that discourage cross-border marriage, so the practice is concentrated among families that are either deeply desperate for escape or seeking the social status that comes with a foreign union. He also points to a clear indicator of the temporary nature of most of these marriages: very few of the women have children with their foreign grooms, a sharp contrast to permanent Yemeni marriages. “A real marriage builds a family, but that rarely happens here,” he said. “We’ve seen dozens of women come back to Yemen with deep emotional trauma after these failed arrangements.”

Even Mona, who found success with her foreign marriage, warns young Yemeni women that this path is not a solution. “Marrying a foreign man isn’t the best choice for a Yemeni girl – it’s a last resort for those who can’t find a Yemeni man who can provide for a family,” she said. “Living far from your home and family with a stranger isn’t easy. I had no other choice, but my advice is to look for a Yemeni husband first.”

A dramatic rescue operation by Pakistani law enforcement has freed a 54-year-old French national and her five children from more than a decade of ongoing abuse and captivity at the hands of the woman’s husband, authorities confirmed this week.

Local police officials shared details of the case with BBC Urdu, outlining how the ordeal began back in 2014, when Sylvie Yasmina and her family relocated from Australia to the remote mountain town of Bara, located in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. According to Yasmina’s formal statements to investigators, her Pakistani husband had held the entire family confined against their will since the cross-country move, subjecting them to daily physical and psychological violence. For 11 years, Yasmina said she was completely cut off from any outside contact, with no ability to reach out to friends, family or French consular officials for help.

The breakthrough in the case came when one of the couple’s older children managed to sneak out of the family’s residence undetected and file a formal complaint with local police. Acting on the tip, law enforcement officers launched a surprise raid on the property, where they made a harrowing discovery: Yasmina and all five of her children were being held in a cramped, severely run-down room, with visible bruising across their bodies from repeated assault.

Investigators have confirmed that two of the children, who were born before the family moved to Pakistan, have missed more than a decade of formal education. The three younger children, all born in Pakistan after the 2014 move, were never enrolled in school at all, leaving them completely deprived of access to education.

Following the rescue, Yasmina and her children were transferred to a secure women’s support shelter in Peshawar, the provincial capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where they are receiving medical care and social support. Police have confirmed that the family plans to return to France to rebuild their lives after their years of captivity. Yasmina’s husband was taken into police custody immediately following the raid, though authorities have not yet released his public identity. Investigators also noted that he had been living illegally in Australia when he and Yasmina first met, and the pair married in 2003, residing in Australia for 11 years before relocating to Pakistan.

In her statement to police, portions of which have been released by local media, Yasmina described the constant suffering her family endured. “We were deprived of our freedom. My husband didn’t take care of us the way he should as a husband and the father of my children. He beats us and put pressure on our lives on a daily basis,” she wrote. “I felt that my future was already ruined, the future of the children would also be ruined.”

On June 24, 2026, hundreds of devout Catholic worshippers gathered in the small rural village of Bibiclat, located in Nueva Ecija province in the northern Philippines, to carry out a centuries-old ritual of faith honoring St. John the Baptist. For the annual Taong Putik, or Mud People, festival, these devotees traded their ordinary clothes for a covering of thick soft mud scavenged from local rice paddies, followed by layers of dried banana leaves wrapped around their bodies, continuing a tradition that ties deeply personal piety to centuries of communal history.

The tradition traces its origins back to the 1800s, rooted in humble beginnings shaped by historical hardship. Local church leaders record that poor 19th century farmers began the practice as an outward act of humility before God; the mud symbolized their connection to the land they worked, while the dried banana leaves allowed them to hide their identities, shielding themselves from widespread discrimination targeting low-income rural communities at the time.

The devotion to St. John the Baptist grew dramatically in the decades following World War II, after a pivotal event that local residents still frame as divine intervention. According to the Rev. Elmer Villamayor, who led the Bibiclat parish between 2014 and 2021, a group of local men were set to be executed by Japanese occupying forces, when a sudden, heavy rainstorm halted the execution entirely, sparing their lives. Local worshippers widely interpreted this turn of events as a miracle granted by their patron saint, cementing the festival’s central role in the village’s spiritual life.

Today, the festival carries on as a way for devotees to honor vows made in private prayer and give thanks for answered miracles and personal blessings. While no official attendance counts are maintained, Villamayor estimates that as many as 3,000 worshippers now participate each year, a number that has grown steadily in recent years as more people report personal blessings through their devotion.

For many participants, the ritual is a multi-generational family tradition, passed down through generations after answered prayers. Melencio Nenuda, a 39-year-old construction worker, recalled that as a child the sight of mud-covered procession participants frightened him so much that he would hide when they passed through the village. That changed when he fell seriously ill in sixth grade: his mother prayed to St. John the Baptist, vowing that Nenuda would join the annual ritual if he recovered. Now, Nenuda returns every year, alongside his wife and son. “I will continue to go back to this tradition because it gives me a good future,” he explained.

Forty-three-year-old Rickmar Castilio, who has participated in the festival for 20 consecutive years, brought his 11-year-old son Nathan for the first time in 2026, carrying out a vow he made years earlier. After Castilio lost his first child in infancy, he promised St. John the Baptist that he would return for the ritual every year if his next child survived. After his prayer was answered, he has kept his promise annually, and now aims to pass his devotion on to the next generation. “(I bring my child so) that he will get closer to St. John. The youth now are starting that path,” Castilio said. He added that he has observed a steady rise in participation in recent years, noting that growing numbers of worshippers are drawn to the tradition after experiencing personal miracles or seeing blessings in their own lives.

The ritual follows a strict, familiar schedule that has remained unchanged for generations. Devotees begin their preparations before dawn, heading out to the surrounding rice fields around 4 a.m. to collect soft mud, which they smear across their entire bodies before wrapping themselves in dried banana leaves. Once fully prepared, they walk barefoot back to the village’s St. John the Baptist Church, carrying only lighted candles and their cellphones. As they wait for the start of the celebratory Mass, they gather to sing hymns around a small fire lit from the accumulated candle offerings.

The Philippines is home to the largest Catholic population in Asia, and the Taong Putik festival remains one of the nation’s most distinctive examples of folk Catholicism, blending centuries of indigenous rural tradition with formal Catholic devotion. This report is from the Associated Press, with religious coverage supported through AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP holds sole responsibility for this content.

Against a backdrop of rising restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights across parts of the United States and systematic constraints on queer advocacy in China, a groundbreaking new cultural institution has opened its doors in one of the nation’s oldest Chinatowns, carving out a permanent public space for Chinese and Chinese diaspora LGBTQ+ artists to share their unfiltered stories.

The brainchild of Chinese artist and longtime LGBTQ+ activist Xiangqi Chen, the OUT Museum celebrated its opening with a rainbow ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of May 2025, timed intentionally to fall between Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Pride Month. Located directly across from the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum in San Francisco’s iconic Chinatown, the bilingual facility fills a long-standing gap in cultural representation for a community that has historically been sidelined and erased in both mainstream Chinese and Western queer spaces.

For Chen, the museum’s launch in San Francisco is the culmination of a years-long journey that began when she first began organizing for LGBTQ+ communities in her native China. More than six years ago, while still based in Shanghai, Chen launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for what would eventually become the OUT Museum, drawing more than 2,000 individual donors. Even then, however, she knew the project could never come to fruition in her home country, where explicit public LGBTQ+ advocacy and expression face growing government restrictions. Chen, who ran a grassroots community center for lesbians in Shanghai for years, ultimately left China in 2022 after a widespread crackdown on queer organizing spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. She arrived in the U.S. on a J-1 visiting scholar visa at Georgetown University, and by 2024, her work caught the attention of San Francisco’s arts community following a high-profile exhibition at the city’s Asian Art Museum. That opportunity led to a residency with the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, which agreed to serve as an incubator for the new museum.

Though the museum’s initial iteration is modest—housed in a single room, open only on Saturdays, and featuring fewer than a dozen works by creators from China and the global Chinese diaspora—its impact is already resonating deeply across local and national queer Asian communities. The debut exhibition showcases a diverse range of mediums, from fine art photography and self-published zines to interactive multimedia installations. One interactive piece invites visitors to use colored thread to trace their own personal journeys of gender and sexual self-discovery, turning passive viewing into collective connection. For Hong Kong-born artist Dixon Ngai, who contributed a hand-painted Chinese porcelain wine pot inspired by the classic Cantonese opera *Di Nü Hua (The Flower Princess)*, the OUT Museum fills a critical void that no generic queer art exhibition has addressed before. Unlike broader LGBTQ+ shows that often marginalize Asian voices, Ngai explained, the OUT Museum centers the specific, intersectional experiences of Chinese queer people, allowing their perspectives to finally receive the visibility they deserve.

In the weeks since opening, Chen says she has been profoundly moved by feedback from an unexpected group: long-time Chinese immigrants to California, both queer and cisgender straight. Visitors have shared deeply personal stories, from a 60-year-old transgender man who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s specifically to access gender-affirming care that was unavailable in his home country, to a straight mother seeking resources to better connect with her adult gay son, who later emailed Chen to thank the museum for creating a space that helped her embrace her child’s identity.

Helen Zia, a celebrated author, queer activist, and member of the OUT Museum’s advisory board, notes that these reactions confirm the institution’s core mission: elevating the visibility of Chinese, Chinese American, and Asian American LGBTQ+ people and affirming their place in both Asian American and broader queer history. Zia, who has organized for queer rights in San Francisco Chinatowns for decades, points to how dramatically community attitudes have shifted just in the last 20 years. When she distributed pro-marriage quality flyers in Oakland’s Chinatown in 2008, she faced regular harassment, including yelling and spitting from opponents, with thousands of protestors from Asian churches gathering weekly to condemn same-sex relationships. Later that same year, after the California Supreme Court struck down the state’s same-sex marriage ban, Zia was among the first same-sex couples to legally wed in the state. Even today, amid growing backlash against LGBTQ+ rights across the U.S., Zia says the museum’s existence sends a vital message: “See our humanity. Here’s the beautiful art that we create and imagine and contribute to the world.”

For Chen, the contrast between the ability to create a public queer museum in San Francisco and the constraints on queer expression in China is stark. While the Chinese Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 2001, same-sex couples still lack legal access to marriage and adoption, and public queer advocacy remains heavily restricted. Chen explains that while subtle queer art exhibitions could occasionally be held in China as recently as the 2010s, shifting policy has eliminated even that limited space today; explicit identification as queer or open discussion of LGBTQ+ themes in public art is no longer permitted.

Even in the U.S., LGBTQ+ rights face growing threats, from state-level bans on gender-affirming care to recent political attacks on Pride-related initiatives. Just weeks before the OUT Museum opened, San Francisco’s MLB team the Giants faced national controversy after players added anti-LGBTQ+ Bible verses to their official Pride Night caps, highlighting that even in traditionally progressive California, shifts in attitude are creating new tensions. Still, for the Chinese creators behind the OUT Museum, the social and political landscape of the Bay Area represents a transformative shift from the constraints they faced in China. Ngai summed up the community’s perspective: “Here in San Francisco, in California, we enjoy the air of freedom, there is equal human rights, there is security. So, we are very proud to be ourselves.”

Chen is set to make her first appearance at the San Francisco Pride Parade this year, dressed as a warrior from Cantonese opera to promote the museum. For her, the opening of the OUT Museum is just the beginning, not the end of the project. Organizers plan to expand the exhibition roster and add more operating days in the coming months, with a long-term goal of growing the institution into a permanent, larger hub for Chinese queer art and activism. “We still have a long way to go,” Chen says.