Bruises and a blind eye in Italy

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 Zora (who asked that her last name not be published) learned of the marriage when a grown son from that union showed up at her Rome apartment.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."

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wilkinson@latimes.com