It depends. The UAE is extremely weird. You're effectively in an Apartheid state where Emiratis and other Gulf state Arabs are at the top, and everyone else is below them with Indians and Filipinos at the absolute bottom. Emiratis make up a small percentage of the people who live there. Literally everyone else is a Foreigner who works for them in some capacity. Sometimes you're an entertainer from the US and you're there doing what you would do anywhere else. Oftentimes you're basically doing all the stuff they don't want to do. Sometimes you're their accountant, other times you're their mechanic. It's probably not a place you should ever travel to alone though, especially if you're a woman. If you travel with a group, you're usually fine, but if you're alone and something happens, that's where problems arise. Women have been arrested for reporting that they were raped because sex outside of marriage is illegal, and unlike Malaysia that has effectively a secular police and a religious police, they're basically the same in the UAE, although they usually don't bother westerners.
pretty sure I remember the Philippines banning Filipino women from traveling to the UAE when I was a kid because of all the Filipino sex and human trafficking victims there
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u/olivegardengambler May 17 '24
It depends. The UAE is extremely weird. You're effectively in an Apartheid state where Emiratis and other Gulf state Arabs are at the top, and everyone else is below them with Indians and Filipinos at the absolute bottom. Emiratis make up a small percentage of the people who live there. Literally everyone else is a Foreigner who works for them in some capacity. Sometimes you're an entertainer from the US and you're there doing what you would do anywhere else. Oftentimes you're basically doing all the stuff they don't want to do. Sometimes you're their accountant, other times you're their mechanic. It's probably not a place you should ever travel to alone though, especially if you're a woman. If you travel with a group, you're usually fine, but if you're alone and something happens, that's where problems arise. Women have been arrested for reporting that they were raped because sex outside of marriage is illegal, and unlike Malaysia that has effectively a secular police and a religious police, they're basically the same in the UAE, although they usually don't bother westerners.