Disgusting: Muslim Women Were Being Auctioned On This Website That Invited Bidders To Harass Them
It’s not a rarely known fact that women are often treated like commodities. I don’t understand – for me to be able to sell something I should have ownership of that thing, right? For me to buy something I should ethically do so from the rightful owner. Last I checked, women are created in the same way men are and these men have no ownership over us. They didn’t create us and neither were we modelled for their fulfilment. So how on earth does our patriarchal society have the audacity to go around treating women like they are commodities they own? Families selling their daughters, people buying and selling brides, flesh trade and imposing a great deal of authority over women threatens our agency. However, recently, a website came to light called ‘Sulli Deals’ that put on sale 90 Muslim women, most of them being Indian.
The now-shut website said it was a “community driven open source project” and it enabled people to place bids on the Muslim women enlisted on the website. This was to harass these women and the list included Muslim journalists, activists, analysts, artists and more. They were auctioned like commodities and people are encouraged to target them. Most of these women were Indian and a few were from Pakistan and other countries.
A Twitter user shared the link and brought the website to everyone’s attention. She was one of the women listed on it.
Somebody made an app of 'Sulli Deals' which has twitter handle of so many Muslim girls. You are one tap away from finding the girl as your deal.
That app has our pictures and our names.
The motto of the app says, 'community driven, open source project' pic.twitter.com/Rc2vyynRMy— K (@madeforbrettLEE) July 4, 2021
While the owners remained anonymous, GitHub, the platform that hosted it took it down. “GitHub has longstanding policies against content and conduct involving harassment, discrimination, and inciting violence. We suspended user accounts following the investigation of reports of such activity, all of which violate our policies,” a GitHub spokesperson told ThePrint.
For example : pic.twitter.com/T4Ty6k9Rsx
— K (@madeforbrettLEE) July 4, 2021
The women listed on the website are planning to file a cybercrime FIR but they said they aren’t very hopeful that anything will be done about it. The Twitter user who revealed the site targeting Muslim women said that the minority group is often harassed for speaking up. She added that rarely any of these women get justice.
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It is not enough to take the website down. This goes down, another will pop up. The internet is a limitless space. We want the owners to be taken down. It’s so wrong to sell these Muslim women online and encouraging people to place bids on harassing them. It’s sick!
