BET SAHOUR, West Bank, Mar 8 (IPS) - We've been warned she's a "harsh case". Hesitantly she enters, a withdrawn smile hidden behind glasses and a canopy of thick black hair. Impassively, she tells her life story - as if it's about someone else entirely: She's 19. Since seven, she's been sexually assaulted by "an influential family relative.
Last year, she heard two younger sisters suffered the same ordeal. But, they were now married, whereas she remained at home, alone in her helplessness. Two months ago, she left, "not knowing where to go." Finally, she found a haven within the ochre walls of this new complex on a Bethlehem hillside looking down on the rugged Judean desert - the Mehwar Centre for the Protection and the Empowerment of Families and Women.
At this centre every day is a woman's day, every week a woman's week. Mehwar means 'the core' in Arabic. The centre shelters Palestinian women and their children seeking refuge from difficult domestic circumstances within the conditions that typify Palestinian reality.
Shelters are usually secret places. We choose instead to send a strong message: this is an open space, not only for victimised women, but also for their community. Violence should not be a secret. It must be dealt with." Mehwar is the first Palestinian centre providing integrative answers to domestic violence. At the centre they not only protect physically and sexually abused women, they seek "to empower" them to play a defining role in society.
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