The warning signs were there from the beginning, now she thinks about it. Rima* was 18 and studying at a Syrian university when her family arranged for her to marry a man several years older than she was.
“From the moment we were married he controlled me,” she says. “I actually agreed to marry him because I wanted to run away from my father’s violence. My brother told me later: you ran from your father’s violence to even worse violence. If I had been more mature I would have waited a bit before getting married. But I was 18.” She sits cross-legged on the floor of a cold house, cradling one of her young sons, half laughing, half crying.
Not long into her marriage, Syria was plunged into civil war, and Rima and her family, like hundreds of thousands of others, fled to neighbouring Lebanon. Not long after they arrived, the problems in their relationship intensified and continued for years, reaching a peak last year, when Rima’s husband nearly killed her in a brutal assault in front of their children.
“He attacked me. He tried to strangle me. I saw black,” she recalls. “He was beating me on the back, on the shoulders. He strangled me to the point there was blood on my neck and I felt I was going to die.”
The catalyst for violence appeared to have been Rima’s threat to report her husband to UN officials for hoarding the cash card which many refugee families depend on for basic goods, and for demanding their son hand over his income to his father.
He himself had given up trying to find employment, she says, citing the economic crisis that overwhelmed Lebanon in 2019 and created an enormous gulf between people’s living costs and incomes. He had grown at once dependent on, but resentful of, the money brought in by his son and wife: Rima had started working as well.
“He didn’t work. He told me, ‘whatever I do, the money will not be enough’,” says Rima.
It was then, she says, that he “lost his senses.” The attack was witnessed by all her sons, including the youngest, aged three. Had it not been for her eldest coming to her aid and alerting her neighbours, Rima is certain she would have died. Despite the severity of the assault, she was too scared to go to the police, she says: “Because I’m a Syrian refugee. And I didn’t know what to expect. I was living in my bubble.”
Immediately after the attack, her husband was still angry. “He called [a neighbour with whom she was staying] and said, ‘You tell Rima to come back and if she doesn’t come back with the kids I will kill her. I will go to your place and kill her.’”
Once he realised it was over, he left for Syria, but not before he had scoured their home for the things he wanted to take with him. Rima now lives in a poorly heated apartment on the edge of a small Lebanese town with her sons. She is consumed with worry about them, their life chances and the impact of their father’s violence: “I feel that I brought them into this life only for them to suffer.”
And she remains afraid. Because her husband left the country soon after assaulting her, she was not able to divorce him. She would need his consent, and he told a neighbour he would not grant her that: “I’m just going to leave her attached to me without being attached to me,” he said, according to Rima. “I’m not going to give her her freedom.”
She dreams of being able to leave Lebanon and travel abroad; of building a life for her and her children out of his long shadow. But that seems unlikely and, in the meantime, she will continue living in fear that one day he will come back to kill her or take their children. Possibly both. “I’m always worried there will be a knock on the door,” she says. “And when I open it, it will be him.”
*Name has been changed to protect her identity
