By Aya Nader, BECAUSE Eighteen year old Egyptian Fatma* got married to a Jordanian rich man in the hope of a better life. On going back to his country, she was shocked by the reality that faced her. She found that she was one of the newlyweds who are used for begging, prostitution, or dancing in nightclubs rather than entering the more conventional married lifestyle she had expected. As much as Fatma was scared of working in those fields, she was afraid to tell her family. The husband treated her as a prostitute, and his family beat her. The 2014 case is not uncommon. With economic hardship and poor living conditions in Egypt, some families make arrangements to marry their daughters off to wealthy men from other Arab countries, unaware of what happens across the borders. This type of trafficking is one of the main issues addressed by the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance (CEWLA). Established in 1995 to work on legal awareness and assistance, CEWLA has spent more than twenty years intervening for women’s legal rights. “Poor people do not have access to justice, along with lack of…
