Married as a child, forced to abandon her son, bereaved then ostracized and now allegedly turned away by the National Society of Human Rights, Shareen has nowhere left to turn. Shareen – not her real name – hails from an undisclosed Asian country, and told Okaz her story of 40 years of woe which began when she married a Saudi in her home country. She was only ten years old. “I had a son by him, and a short time after the birth my husband left me to go back to the Kingdom, but a year later he persuaded me to go and stay with him for a few months and leave my son behind,” Shareen said. “Soon after I'd arrived, though, he forced me to stay, as I'd got pregnant with our daughter.” At an unspecified date, Shareen's husband passed away, leaving her in the hands of her in-laws who, she said, forced her to work as their housemaid and routinely subjected her to “humiliation”. “I put up with it all for many years, until my son came to the Kingdom after we'd been 20 years apart, and my daughter was proven as my late husband's child and my marriage to him finally made official,” she said. Shareen's hopes that the return of her son would be a step towards resolving her problems, however, were soon dashed. “I sorted out his national identity card in accordance with his late father's card, and he became my sponsor,” she said. “Straight away, though, he started accusing me of betraying him and having abandoned him all those years, and all he wanted to do was hurt me and get rid of me, particularly once his sister got married and left my care.” Shareen said she was subject to “blackmail and sexual harassment” on the part of her late husbands' male relatives, and that her son also started making blackmail threats against her. “He kept telling me: ‘I'm you're sponsor, you're my property',” Shareen said. At this point Shareen decided to turn to the courts for help, making a formal complaint concerning her treatment, but the judge took the side of her son and his accusations that she engaged in “deviant behavior”. Following the failed court case Shareen threw her son out of the rented house she was living in, paid for by a charitable benefactor, and turned to the local “umdah” – a form of district administrator who answers to the police – and he warned her son that any further threats of any kind against his mother would see police involvement. “But then my son started to try and get to me through other people, and had my electricity cut off,” she said. She then turned to the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) for help, but the non-governmental organization, according to Shareen, said they couldn't help as her situation was the jurisdiction of the Passports Department. Shareen today finds herself in limbo, the “property of others”, waiting in the hope that someone of goodwill might come forward and offer her a way out. “All I want now is for my sponsorship to be transferred to a family that will allow me some dignity,” she said. As for the NSHR, the head of its Makkah office, Hussein Al-Shareef, said that they had received no formal complaint from Shareen. “There was only a phone call during which advice was given,” Al
