TEL EL-HAYAT, Lebanon (AP) – The Syrian refugee woman huddled in the latest room she calls home, a peeling, run-down place outside a north Lebanese village. The mother of six doesn’t know how she’ll pay the rent. She’s gotten by over the past year by taking a series of lovers who would pay for her housing.
But then a few months ago she was arrested for prostitution. That put a scare in her – that and threatening mobile messages from a former lover – so she’s trying to go it alone.
“I could never imagine that I’d reach this point,” said 38-year-old Samar, who lived a middle-class life back in Syria with a husband who has disappeared since his arrest by Syrian troops.
Syrian women and girls are growing more vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Lebanon as their exile drags out and poverty increases, relief workers say. Some women are driven into outright prostitution. Others like Samar engage in what relief workers call survival sex, striking up sexual relationships with men who can provide rent or food. With Syrian women seen as vulnerable, they face sexual harassment in the streets and exploitation by bosses, landlords and charity workers on whom they rely, as described by more than a dozen refugee women interviewed by The Associated Press.
Some mothers push daughters in their early teens into marriage, either because they can’t afford to care for them or because they hope a husband will protect them, only to have the girls abused by their much older husbands.