Tricked and Trapped: Human Trafficking in the Middle East, ‎pdf 4.1 MB

words too like ‘I love you’.” 177 A journalist in Lebanon learned at first hand
about the violence meted out to women: “I worked undercover for three
months, pretending to be a pimp. I heard a girl screaming and asked the
pimp why she was screaming. He told me that they were beating her because
she was refusing to prostitute herself. The girl was 15 and from a Bedouin
family in Syria.” 178
The threat of physical violence was also a major impediment to leaving (box
3.15). A manager of a bar in Lebanon said openly that the employer “can
hurt her too much if she gets caught running away”.
Box 3.15. Use of violence against sex workers in bars
“Once a girl has entered the sector, she can’t get out. If I discover she wants
to work for another club or bar, I will send a fake client to beat her and
she will get back to work for me. It’s like that here, once you begin with an
owner, you do not leave him.”
Interview with an owner of a bar, Lebanon, 24 April 2012.
The sex worker also risks being harmed even if she does succeed in running
away and filing a case in court. A judge in Lebanon explained that she had
dealt with one case involving an Iraqi woman who had been forced into
prostitution. “Men found ways to threaten her while in preventive detention
in Baabda, and promised to burn down her house and take away her children,”
recalled the judge. “At the hearings, there were large men sitting there, trying
to scare me, the presiding judge. After the second hearing, the woman’s house
was set on fire.” 179
Box 3.16. Means of coercion
“In one hotel I know in Amman, you can find Russian, Tunisian and Moroccan
women that are forced to work and stay here until their contracts
end because their passports are taken from them and they are threatened
and beaten. But this only happens to foreign women, not Jordanians. Their
contract does not state that they have to provide sexual services but they
must know what they were coming to do here. They did not think they
were coming here to pray, did they?”
Interview with sex broker, Jordan, 11 November 2011.
177
Interview with a manager of a bar, Lebanon, 24 Apr. 2012.
178
Interview with a journalist, Lebanon, 15 May 2012.
179
Interview with a judge at the Court of Baabda, Lebanon, 11 Jan. 2012.
91