Family Oppression Once Again

By: Yahya Alous

She doesn't know where she will be in a year or even a month later, but she says that she will not be in the place she has just escaped from…Tonight is the first time in several days that she has felt safe and warm…she is in a shelter! She knows that people are searching for her and that they would shed her blood with impunity but she is not afraid. Perhaps she will be defiant. Today she had that chance, but who can she defy?

Will she defy the knife that glints in the distance, ready to cut her throat? Will she defy the fist that rains blows upon her? She will defy something called family oppression…and perhaps she will challenge herself and find that she is still here on earth and still capable of thinking and determining her own destiny.

She was not yet nineteen when she ran away. Fleeing the family home, she preferred to aimlessly wander the streets of Damascus searching for shelter or a place to earn a living, somewhere far from the constant violence she suffered in her parents' house. This, in short, is the story of "Kh.D", a story which concludes with her eventual arrival at the home for assaulted women. Here she is protected from this savage city which, if it violates the old, what will it do to an adolescent village girl?

She could take no more. She ran away from home, no longer able to stay in a house in which her brothers beat her to the extent that it had become inescapable, a daily routine. Her parents are separated, her father married to another woman and her mother helpless in the face of beatings from sons who have neither morals nor mercy to constrain their behavior. ..

For a while "Kh.D" stayed with some relatives near Damascus but this did not last long. In no time at all her brothers were demanding she return home, threatening that if she didn’t come back….

"Kh.D." says, "Asking me to return was like asking someone to put his feet in the fire. In was reminded of what awaited me there by the bruises still on my body. It was this that stopped me going back."

I won't go back…She repeated this to herself over and over despite the looks of obvious longing on the faces of her poor mother and her young siblings. She preferred to leave, telling herself, "They have God to protect them."

She was knocking on doors looking for work and a place to sleep when she found someone who guided her to the shelter. There in that little place she found someone to protect her, someone to give her soap and water and food the like of which she had never tasted before. Most importantly, she found someone to listen to her and to take an interest.

"Kh.D." is just one of thousands of girls whose souls are torn apart by violence…one of thousands whose hearts are permanently frozen by fear. He is one of many desperate women who live among us but who, sadly, we barely see or do not want to admit we see.