JEDDAH, 23 October 2005 — Women in Saudi Arabia enjoy a great deal of respect for their modesty and behavior, but some are misusing that respect to steal everything from jewelry to clothing and groceries, using loose-fitting abayas to conceal the loot.
If challenged, they claim the shopkeepers are harassing them, prompting some shopkeepers to write off the thefts as a cost of business; some shopkeepers, however, are taking measures to protect their goods and catch the thieves red-handed.
In Madinah, shopowners say they may be targeted by professional thieves who take advantage of the Kingdom’s cultural structure.
Abdullah Eshfaqa owns a supermarket in central Madinah. He said theft cases increase dramatically during the holy month. “Ramadan is a good season for us, yet full of headaches,” Eshfaqa said. “There is no way we can stop female thieves. They hide what they take inside their bags and sometimes hide them underneath their abayas. We can’t physically search them, and we don’t have any women working in the store who could search them.”
The grocer said it is not worth the bother to try and snare the women.
“Last year, one of our workers spotted a woman stealing and hiding chocolate inside her abaya,” Eshfaqa said. When he confronted her, she started screaming and shouting and accusing him of harassing her. “She created a big scene and gathered a lot of people around her. Worse still, she started crying. Many people began believing her story and saying our accusations were unfounded. Now we have a policy in the supermarket: We keep our eyes open, and if a female snatches something we let her go because it saves us a lot of headaches.”
For a gold merchant, the situation is a little more challenging and costly because jewelry is extremely concealable — and valuable.
“It’s easy to stop a woman thief from stealing,” said Sultan Mahdi, a gold shop owner. “It happened to me before when I used to present pieces of jewelry to the customer. Women thieves would ask to see many pieces at once. For example, if I showed seven pieces on the table, and she decided not to buy, I would find only five remaining on the table. They are quick to hide stolen items in areas we cannot see or search.”
That would lead to arguments shopkeepers are unlikely to win.
“If I insisted that I put seven pieces on the table, she would insist that I only put out five,” Mahdi said. “Then she would say that I was trying to accuse her or harass her.”
It made him change his sales techniques.
“I decided that when I show a piece of gold to a customer I take that piece back before I show her the new one,” he said.
Another new twist are security cameras that miss very little.
“To stop women thieves from accusing me of lying or harassment, I installed cameras over the counter that show everything, so when I accuse someone of stealing, I have proof to back it up,” Mahdi said. “I also installed a safe table to present my product where customers look at what they want to buy through a glass. Only when they decide to buy do I take a piece out.”
Mushtaq Sadik, a Southeast Asian clerk in a women’s and children’s clothing store, said he has to deal with several theft cases every week.
“The best way to avoid these women thieves is by monitoring every corner of the store and to actually show shoppers that we are watching,” Sadik said. “When thieves see that they are under watch, they leave and search elsewhere for an easy target.”
He said sometimes girl gangs try to hit the store. “They come in groups, and they scatter around the store,” Sadik said. “They’ll try to distract the store owner or the workers to make it easy for the thieves among them to operate.”
The women thieves may have met their match in Sadik. “Personally, I don’t have a problem with shouting at a female thief,” Sadik said. “Saudis here prefer, for cultural reasons, to avoid the encounter, but I don’t. The other day I spotted a female thief stealing some clothing and hiding it underneath her abaya. When I confronted her about the theft, she started to shout, thinking that I would back up like a normal Saudi.”
She was wrong.
“I closed the store doors and prevented her from leaving with the goods,” Sadik said. “She did create a scene, but I didn’t care about that. She started cursing me, but in the end, she threw what she stole at my face and said that she could buy the whole store with her money.”
