Sixteen-year-old Tira flicks through her phone. She sits cross-legged on the sitting-room floor in the cold, scarcely furnished apartment that her mother rents. She looks like a normal Syrian teenager; her hair is scraped into a tight ponytail, some kohl is smudged under her eyes and light acne dapples her cheeks. She wears a black poloneck with lacy sleeves, and stares at the screen with unfaltering concentration.
When she eventually finds the photograph, she turns her phone on its side to show us. On the screen is a double bed with a frilly red eiderdown and four red pillows. A heart-shaped cushion bearing the words “I love you” is perched on the headboard. This is where Amr — an overweight Saudi Arabian man in his sixties — first raped her. He had hidden a stick under one of the pillows and beat her with it as she tried to resist him.
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