Sex tourism' prevalent from the '80s, say activists

Hyderabad: In the early 1980s, young men from Middle East countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, United Arab Emirates and Oman started coming to Hyderabad to find a match for themselves. 

“Mostly young men or rather bachelors came here to marry girls from the local Yemen community settled in Barkas locality. Several families from Yemen, who had settled down in Hyderabad , married off their daughters to young men. There was nothing like ‘short term marriage’ during that period,” recalls Qazi Habeeb Ahmed Bin Salam Al Attas whose family had performed many marriages of foreign nationals.

According to Abdul Raheem Bavazir, a social worker, the trend had started after a few young men from Barkas went to work in the Gulf countries and met their community members living there. The relationship grew and the foreigners started visiting their distant relatives in Barkas. It was around this time that a few brokers exploited the situation and started fixing marriages of old Arab sheikhs with local girls. Some activists started describing the problem as ‘sex tourism’.