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No Demand No Supply

On the 27th of March 2016, the inquisitorial commission in Mount Lebanon raided “Chez Maurice” and “Silver” brothels in Jounieh area, east of Beirut, and saved seventy-five Syrian refugee women from what became known later as the largest sex trafficking network in the history of Lebanon. The story gained huge media attention as the women told horrifying stories about the torture and abuse they suffered at the hands of one of the lead figures of the network, which was making more than one million dollars a month according to the police reports. Few weeks after the uncovering of the story, the media lost interest in it and slowly it started fading into oblivion. No Demand No Supply aims at giving voice to the women’s stories while shedding light on an aspect that was totally disregarded in the mainstream media: the sex buyer. The play is still as relevant today as it was in 2017. The court hearings are still in progress. So far, almost three years after closing down the brothels, seven court hearings took place in which nothing really happened because some of the accused are simply not showing up at the court. The victims are still waiting for justice while Imad Al-Rihawi, the trafficker who was in charge of managing the network and torturing the women, was released on a 20 million Lebanese pound (approximately 13 thousand dollars) bail on June 20, 2017, and Fawaz Ali Al-Hassan, the head of the network, was never caught.