Bruises and a blind eye in Italy

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/15/world/fg-polygamy15

Bruises and a blind eye in Italy Tied up in a knot
By Tracy Wilkinson
July 15, 2008

A few miles from the Vatican, Najat Hadi kept house with her husband,
his other wife and their assorted children, an unhappy home with a
hateful woman 10 years her junior and a cruel spouse who left her
with a jagged scar peeking from her collar.

Finally, she says, her Egyptian-born husband, who worked in Rome
making pizzas, beat her so badly that she left him. But he kept her
children.

Thousands of polygamous marriages like Hadi's have sprung up
throughout Italy as a byproduct of a fast-paced and voluminous
immigration by Muslims to this Roman Catholic country.

Despite the obvious culture clash, Italian authorities largely turn a
blind eye, leaving women in a murky semi-clandestine world with few
rights and no recourse when things go especially badly, as they did
in Hadi's case.

"It is absurd that in a civilized country like Italy, so little is
acknowledged about this," said Souad Sbai, a Moroccan-born Italian
lawmaker who has emerged as a one-woman champion of female Muslim
immigrants here.

Italy is one of several European nations faced with the issue of
polygamy. In Britain and Spain, where large Muslim communities have
also settled, some officials favor recognizing polygamous marriage as
a way to ensure the wives' access to pensions, medical care and other
state benefits.

But Sbai, who has lived 27 of her 47 years in Italy, thinks that
misguided attempts at cultural sensitivity backfire when customs that
stray into illegality are tolerated. Italian law sanctions marriage
between a single man and a single woman only.

Sbai estimates that there are 14,000 polygamous families in Italy;
others put the number even higher. Many take advantage of the so-
called orfi marriage, a less formal union performed by an imam, that
does not carry the same social or legal standing as regular marriage.

She is convinced that the polygamists in Italy are practicing a more
fundamentalist and abusive form of multiple marriage. Because they
feel so threatened by the Western culture around them, the men often
imprison their wives and confine them to a life of solitude wholly
dependent on the husband.

"They are kept in a kind of ghetto," Sbai said.

When Sbai recently created a hotline for Muslim immigrant women, she
was inundated with 1,000 calls in the first three months. To her
astonishment, she had tapped into a hidden community of women
desperate for information, many trapped in violent, polygamous
households, isolated and lonely.

Hadi, a Moroccan, had endured beatings and humiliation because she
felt she had nowhere to turn. She said she met and married her
husband in 1987 in Italy, where she was visiting on holiday. They had
a religious ceremony at a local mosque and a legal wedding at the
Egyptian Embassy in Rome. Over the next decade, she gave birth to
four children.

Then, one day in 2000, Hadi returned from a vacation in Egypt, where
she had taken the children to spend time with her husband's family.
In her Rome apartment was a new woman. Her husband had married again
while she was gone.

"I returned and found her in my house," Hadi, 46, said. Hadi said she
at first challenged her husband but then decided there was little she
could do.

"He said, `I've married this woman.' I wanted to know why. I told him
to send her away. He refused. But where could I go with four
children?" She tried to accommodate the other woman, an Egyptian whom
Hadi describes as full of hatred.

"I tried to accept her, for the children," Hadi said. "But she wasn't
a woman with a brain."

Her husband's beatings got worse, landing Hadi repeatedly in the
hospital. The pale scar on her chest is a remnant of the time she
says he took after her with a knife.

Then, about a year and a half ago, he turned on the children. And
that was when she decided she had to go. From other Moroccan women,
she learned of Sbai's center and prepared to file a criminal
complaint against him. But he seized the children and fled to Egypt.
Hadi has not been able to move authorities to help her regain custody.

Sbai, the politician, remembers polygamy from her childhood in
Morocco. There, at least officially, the husband could marry no more
women than he could adequately and justly care for. Here in Italy,
she says, polygamy is often distorted. The immigrant experience is
turned on its head: regression and isolation instead of integration.

Of the hundreds of women Sbai hears from, most are Moroccans and
illiterate, at a much higher percentage rate than in Morocco. That
also tends to isolate them, a condition compounded by mistrust of
Italian authorities and fear of the unknown.

Aliza Kalisa, 50, joined her Moroccan husband in Italy in 2001. They
had been married for many years, but when she arrived in Rome, she
found he had used his time here to take on a second wife.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she recalled asking him.

"I needed a woman here, and you were in Morocco," he responded.

Kalisa was devastated. She lived with her husband, his other wife and
the woman's two children in a one-room apartment, where she was
forced to sleep on the floor and listen as her husband and the
younger woman had sex. He treated her badly, flaunting the second
wife like a prize and forcing Kalisa to do the housework and care for
the children – the second wife's children.

He forced her to fork over all her earnings as a maid in an Italian
family's home. He beat her. Kalisa thinks the other wife delighted in
the abuse she suffered; the woman peppered Kalisa with taunts that
she was the favorite.

"I had been his wife such a long time," Kalisa said. "Then I was like
the servant."

When, at the end of her rope, she threatened to leave, her husband
locked her in the apartment for 10 days. Eventually her screams
prompted an Italian neighbor to call the police, and Kalisa was able
to leave. At Sbai's center, Kalisa is learning to write her name for
the first time.

Zora, a Moroccan who has lived in Italy for 27 years, met and married
an Egyptian in Rome in 1989. Though he swore he was single, it turned
out he had another wife back in Egypt. Zora (who asked that her last
name not be published) learned of the marriage when a grown son from
that union showed up at her Rome apartment.

"I was speechless," said Zora, who is 52 but looks 35.

Zora began to suspect that her husband's son was molesting her son,
who was 6 at the time. The boy was bruised and terrified to be left
alone with his older half-sibling. She, in turn, was terrified to say
anything to her husband. When Zora confirmed that the abuse was
taking place, her anger overcame her fear. She grabbed her son and
fled.

Sbai, the politician, helps women such as Zora get or keep jobs,
however low-paying, and begin to navigate the basics of Italian legal
red tape. Zora, for example, is trying to have her son's name removed
from her husband's passport and added to hers to prevent him from
taking the boy and leaving the country. The women are also receiving
elemental education and are given access to a psychologist, though
counseling has been slow-going because most are reluctant to discuss
their ordeals.

"We are not at the point of integration yet," said the psychologist,
Lucia Basile. After what they have been through, "we first need to
teach them that they have dignity and that they exist."

Hadi, for one, has taken up that cause. As she campaigns for the
return of her children, she has joined Sbai's office, works the
emergency hotline and is reaching out to other Moroccan and immigrant
women to inform them of their rights and opportunities.

"It's always the women," she said, "who pay the price."

wilkinson@...