Source: The Daily Beast

They have escaped one war only to find themselves as casualties and combatants in another—a conflict waged against them less publicly and not with bullets or missiles. The weapons employed are sexual harassment and abuse, domestic violence and the exploitation by the unscrupulous of economic distress, forcing some to agree to prostitution, others to sell off teenage daughters as child brides.

For many Syrian women who have sought sanctuary in neighboring Lebanon from a civil war that has left an estimated 100,000 dead since the conflict started in March 2011, their refuge is laden with new menace and suffering—compounding their grief over the deaths of family or friends or their depression at the loss of homes. Even within their families there’s sometimes no safety, with jobless husbands frustrated with the stress and indignity of living as refugees lashing out, beating wives and hitting kids.

Maryam, a 31-year-old mother of five from Damascus, says she’s afraid the whole time and living in fear in Lebanon. She says there’s no safety for her. Outside the three-room apartment that she and her husband and children share with another six relatives there’s virtual non-stop sexual harassment, she says—from mild forms of uninvited verbal flirtation to groping and forceful demands for sexual favors by storeowners or officials. And even male aid workers aren’t beyond wanting to trade sex for help.

A divorced relative, a mother of two kids, experienced that recently, says Maryam. “One of the men at an NGO told her that if you accept to sleep with me, if we can have a sexual relations, every time I have any kind of access to assistance, it will be yours. It will have your name on it.”

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