To Be Raped or to Become a Prostitute

To Be Raped or to Become a Prostitute

Elhanan is a 24-year-old Ethiopian woman with broad shoulders, short black hair, and a nest of wrinkles surrounding her brown eyes. She came to Lebanon five months ago to work as a maid. She was promised a monthly salary of $200 and the option to return to her native country if she disliked her working conditions. Yet after Elhanan arrived in Beirut, the man who owned the house she tended took her passport and, when his wife and children left the house, often raped her. “I said, 'No, mister,'” Elhanan (which is not her real name) told me in an office near a safe house in the suburbs of Beirut. “I always said, 'No, mister.' But then he would threaten to kill me.”

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