The UK Guardian on Wednesday published a report about hundreds of young Saudi Arabian women being held in secretive facilities — variously described as “care homes,” “jails,” “shelters,” and “prisons” — where they face brutal punishment for disobeying their husbands or male family members.
The official name of these facilities is Dar al-Reaya, which means “care home” in Arabic. The system was established in the 1960s to rehabilitate young female criminals. Activists dedicated to exposing the Dar al-Reaya system, such as ALQST for Human Rights, say the care homes soon became a convenient dumping ground for “disobedient” women, who could be consigned to the squalid and abuse facilities at the whim of their husbands or male guardians.
“It is a prison, not a care home, as they like to call it. They call each other by numbers. ‘Number 35, come here.’ When one of the girls shared her family name, she got lashes. If she doesn’t pray, she gets lashes. If she is found alone with another woman she gets lashes and is accused of being a lesbian. The guards gather and watch when the girls are being lashed,” activist Sarah al-Yahia told the Guardian.
“They make it impossible for others to help women fleeing abuse. I know a woman who was sentenced to six months in jail because she helped a victim of violence. Giving shelter in the case of a woman charged for ‘absenteeism’ is a crime in Saudi Arabia,” she noted.
“If you are sexually abused or get pregnant by your brother or father you are the one sent to Dar al-Reaya to protect the family’s reputation,” she said.
The Guardian interviewed care home survivors who supported Yahia’s allegations, describing how they were incarcerated after suffering beatings from their male relatives, or for disappointing their families by becoming pregnant. Yahiya herself said she was threatened with imprisonment in the Dar al-Reaya system for resisting her father’s sexual abuse. In recent years, women have allegedly been sent to the homes for writing social media posts.
Once trapped in the care home system, women cannot leave without the consent of their male guardian. The inmates are beaten, humiliated, indoctrinated, and drugged. Those who complain are brusquely told by the staff that they could face even worse abuse, or murder, if they return home.
Some of the women consigned to the Dar al-Reaya system never leave. The homes are supposedly reserved for women up to age 30, but those who “age out” can be transferred into a related network called Dar al-Theyafa (“guest home” or “home of hospitality”) where they could remain indefinitely.
The women who spoke to the Guardian said knowledge of the care homes is fairly widespread among Saudi women, as they are so often threatened with being sent to the facilities if they misbehave or dishonor their families.
The outside world remains largely unaware of the homes because discussing them with outsiders is forbidden. Awareness of the care homes has been raised because some of the women attempted to escape or threatened to commit suicide, and they were caught on camera.
The Guardian said the most recent data on the facilities it could obtain was from 2016 and, at that time, there were officially 233 girls and women held in seven facilities across Saudi Arabia. Saudi officials announced plans to open more facilities in 2018, but it was not clear if these plans were followed up on.
“Every girl growing up in Saudi knows about Dar al-Reaya and how awful it is. It’s like hell. I tried to end my life when I found out I was going to be taken to one. I knew what happened to women there and thought, ‘I can’t survive it,’” said one young woman.
A Saudi government spokesman told the Guardian that a network of “care homes” does exist, but described them as specialized facilities intended to help abused women and children.
“These are not detention centers, and any allegation of abuse is taken seriously and subject to thorough investigation,” the official said.
“Women are free to leave at any time, whether to attend school, work, or other personal activities, and may exit permanently whenever they choose with no need of approval from a guardian or family member,” the official insisted.
Saudi Arabia has been attempting to improve its medieval image, in line with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “Saudi Vision 2030” program. A key feature of the plan to diversify the Saudi economy away from total reliance on oil was to modernize the Kingdom and make it more receptive to foreign investors.
The Saudis have made a few concrete gestures toward equalization of women’s rights, most famously in 2017 when King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud decreed that women should be allowed to drive. Ironically, one of the reasons Saudi officials talked about building more care homes in 2018 was because women drivers might break traffic laws and require rehabilitation.
The Saudi government has opened some important jobs to women and, on International Women’s Day 2022, it passed a “personal status law” that was touted as a major human rights achievement by Saudi officials. Among other provisions of the law, women were now permitted to become legal guardians of their children, initiate divorce proceedings, and demand alimony.
International human rights groups contend these reforms sought to burnish the regime’s image rather than ensure women’s safety, arguing that the personal status law did as much to codify male domination of women as it did to liberate women from oppressive customs. Critics of the Saudi government were outraged when the United Nations made Saudi Arabia chair of its Women’s Rights Commission in March 2025.
“As chair, Saudi Arabia is now in a key position to influence the planning and decisions of the world’s top women’s right body. Yet despite cosmetic reforms, Saudi Arabia continues to subject women to legal discrimination, where they are effectively enslaved under a male guardianship system that was enshrined into law three years ago, ironically on International Women’s Day,” said U.N. Watch executive director Hillel Neuer, referring to the passage of the personal status law.
