Bruises and a blind eye in Italy

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.

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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.