Chubby teenage schoolgirls approached, in green tunics and with neatly braided hair, their black shoes clicking against the dusty, uneven road. Jatu has fine cheekbones and brown eyes, framed by close-cropped hairβshe wears it this way because she cannot afford to get it braided.
As the girls passed, she turned away to hide the scars carved into the left side of her face, neck and shoulders, reminders of when she was mowed down by a taxi at the age of eight. The driver abandoned the car and fled, leaving Jatu for dead. Born to a single mother with two other children, in a poor riverside community near New Kru Town called Crab Hole, Jatu told me she left home voluntarily at age eleven after sensing she was a burden on her family.
Before she could argue, they dragged her behind a car and raped her. For a time, she lived with nine other girls in a tiny room, kept by an older woman who took a cut of her earnings, and sent what money she could to her mother.
She still sends money to her family. Unlike in many developing countries, where children are trafficked and forced into sex work by crime syndicates, many Liberian girls are encouraged to cut jopu by their families and friends, among whom their work is an open but largely unspoken secret.
Before the civil war, it was common for well-off families to take on girls from remote villages as domestic workers, usually on the promise of paying for their education. Under such arrangements, these girls were often also forced to have sex with the man of the house, and sent back home if they became pregnant. Today, Williams said, the legacy of sexual violence during the war has become an excuse for widespread abuse of girls and women.
