Friday, December 30, 2005
Clashes of cultures ... two sides
The rescuers
Every year, hundreds of young Britons are forced into marriage in Pakistan against their will. Who can they turn to? Perhaps a team of unlikely British diplomats can help. Declan Walsh joins them at work
Declan Walsh Friday December 9, 2005
Guardian
Almost free, Yasmin Rehman darts breathlessly through the sleepy Punjabi village. Running down a sandy lane, the 21-year-old from Bradford heads for the main road, her green shalwar kameez streaming in her wake. Behind her, clutching a hastily packed suitcase, is a British diplomat and, by his side, a Pakistani bodyguard, a pistol concealed under his clothes.
A Land Rover is waiting at the end of the path. Rehman leaps in and the jeep roars off, weaving around donkeys, tractors and a gaggle of curious kids. For a moment she sits tensely, her hands gripping the back seat and her eyes fixed forward.
"I'm so embarrassed, I'm really scared, I've never done anything like this before. But I had no choice," she babbles nervously in a strong northern accent. She has just escaped a nightmare: Rehman has been thrashed by her father, threatened at gunpoint by her uncle and forced to marry a complete stranger. "I can't trust my family, never again," she says. "Next time they could kill me."
Caught between cultures and pressured by their families, hundreds of young British-Pakistani women are trapped in forced marriages in Pakistan every year. The ordeal results in tears, trauma and sometimes brutal domestic violence. But it usually starts innocently. Parents prod the young women to fly back to Pakistan for a short holiday to visit an ailing granny or celebrate a cousin's wedding. Then it all goes wrong. The weeks stretch into months. Passports go missing and return flights are cancelled. Mysterious suitors appear on the relatives' doorstep. A sour truth dawns on the woman: the wedding being planned is her own.
The parents, eager for what they regard as a good marriage, apply emotional pressure or, failing that, may resort to violence. Running away is rarely an option: male relatives keep a jealous eye and in small-town Pakistan a woman doing anything alone, even walking to a bus, triggers alarm bells.
There is one hope: the diplomatic snatch squad. Such is the plight of dual nationals caught in forced marriages that a special team has been established inside the British High Commission in Islamabad to rescue them. On average, diplomatic jeeps leave the high-walled compound for the villages of Punjab and Kashmir twice a week. Their mission: to pluck the reluctant brides from the clutches of their cousins, whisk them to safety and put them on a plane back to the UK. Last year the team saved 105 young people, according to Helen Feather, head of the consular section and leader of the team. Most are between 18 and 24, although the youngest was 14. "This is a human rights abuse and these are British nationals in distress," she says.
The pioneering programme is sensitive and secretive, plunging British officials into a fraught world of clashing cultures and family traumas; the Guardian is the first media organisation to accompany the team on a mission. Consular official Jon Turner is in charge of Rehman's rescue. With his grey hair and mild manners, Turner does not look like a typical dashing hero, though he has helped dozens of young women to escape.
The hunt begins one bright morning as Turner's high commission jeep is rushing through eastern Punjab. Turner's phone rings: it's Rehman. "It will be OK," Turner assures her. "Stay calm, act natural, we don't want them to get suspicious. And hang on to this phone. That's the most important thing." He hangs up. "The girls get incredibly worried at this stage," he says. "So do we, but we try not to show it."
According to Turner, the rescues often follow a similar pattern. A worried relative or boyfriend in the UK usually makes the initial contact with the Foreign Office. Sometimes the victim herself sends an SOS. Through hushed late-night conversations and secretive text messages, Turner and his team establish contact. After days or weeks of careful preparation, a time and date are agreed.
The element of surprise is crucial, he says. Local police are informed hours beforehand, and asked to provide back-up. Some officers are sympathetic; others need persuading. Finally, Turner knocks on the front door. What follows, he admits, is a wrenching experience for everyone.
Flustered relatives plead with the girl to stay, often resorting to emotional blackmail. "The family can be very tough and vitriolic," says Turner. "They say, 'Your father will have a heart attack,' 'Your mother will commit suicide,' 'You will bring dishonour to our family.'" The team can do little other than to remind relatives that any trouble could reflect poorly in future visa applications. The victim, says Turner, almost always feels guilty. "That's why we try to make it quick."
After escaping, the young woman is rushed to Islamabad and lodged in a refuge run by Struggle for Change (Sach), a Pakistani organisation that supports victims of forced marriage and domestic violence. The high commission will issue an emergency passport and, if necessary, loan her the price of her plane fare home. The address of the refuge is kept secret in case furious relatives try to snatch the woman back. Within a few days she travels to the airport; in high-risk cases she may be hidden under a shawl, flown out from a regional airport or escorted on to the plane.
Most rescues are resolved peacefully, Turner stresses. But in a country where so-called "honour killings" - in which reluctant family members, usually young women, are murdered rather than bring dishonour on the family - are frequent, the dangers are real. An armed bodyguard comes on every rescue. During one encounter, police cocked their weapons and formed a circle around the woman as they left the house. "It turned out her uncle was a well known kidnapper, extortionist and murderer," says Turner. In other cases, stealth is required. Last July Razia, a 19-year-old woman from Luton, was betrothed against her will to her 16-year-old cousin. Her only chance of escape was at 4am, during a family trip to Islamabad airport to see off an aunt travelling abroad. In the melee of the packed concourse Razia slipped away to find Ghazala Shah, one of two Pakistani officials on the rescue team, waiting by the toilets. As the two women walked towards the entrance, Turner was waiting in his car, and they leaped inside. "It was all done in less than 10 seconds," he says.
Rehman's rescue is comparatively easy. A perky, whippet-thin young woman, she blames the trouble on her dad, a Bradford taxi driver. "He's a bit old fashioned. He didn't like English clothes; he burned my jeans once. He didn't like girls going out and about," she says. But most of all, he didn't like the idea of her boyfriend, Mujahid. Although he is also a British Pakistani, Rehman's father believed he was from the wrong caste. So last February he sent Rehman on a five-week holiday to her cousin's in eastern Punjab. It was to last eight months.
She might have seen it coming. Rehman knew of several other girls whose passports had been burned, and her parents had already tried to marry her off once, when she was 17. That time she feigned illness and was sent back to the UK. But this time there was no escape. The marriage took place in June, to a 23-year-old architect from Gujranwala. At the wedding feast Rehman wept until makeup streamed down her face, while her father and father-in-law heaped gold rings and bangles on her. Relatives thought it a show, part of a Punjabi custom where newly-weds show their sorrow at leaving their family. "They thought I was sad to be leaving them," she says. "I just wanted to get away."
Predictably, married life was a disaster. Rehman scandalised her new in-laws by refusing to sleep with her husband, Ishfan. "It was like living as strangers. I used to sleep in the house, he was on a bed outside. I think he used to count the stars," she says. She resented the constricted life of a rural Pakistani woman; back in the UK she had earned her own money as a cashier in Safeways and Poundland and was used to going out with her friends. She pined for burgers, chips and jeans. Arguments erupted with her sister-in-law. "She was a bitch. She used to talk about me to her friends, saying I just slept all day. I said, 'I'm no fucking slave, why should I do all the work?'"
Finally, she told Ishfan she was already in love with another man. Her father and uncle beat her brutally, demanding to know Mujahid's address in Bradford. "They said, 'Watch what we will do to him, we will break his legs.'" Her uncle ordered her to surrender her mobile phone. When she refused he pulled out a gun and pointed it at her head.
"He said, 'You don't deserve to live'. I started crying and told him I had thrown the phone away. Then my dad came in and hit me some more," she says. That night Rehman waited until everyone else had gone to bed before texting Mujahid. Then she carefully hid the phone in a bag of sanitary pads. "They wouldn't dream of looking in there," she says with a smile.
By the time the snatch squad arrive, Rehman's father and uncle have returned to their jobs as taxi drivers in England. Only her grandmother and an aunt are home. They swear at Rehman in Punjabi and urge her to stay. But it is too late; she signs a police statement and leaves.
Sitting in a riverside cafe, Rehman's initial elation has been swamped by a tide of doubt and uncertainty. "I feel so depressed now, so stressed out," she says, pulling on a cigarette. "I just want to put it all behind me and get back to the UK." During the meal Shah's phone rings. It is Ishfan, begging his wife to come back. Rehman refuses the call. He wasn't a bad guy, she says; he was just the wrong guy. "I feel sorry for him. He wanted to have kids and stay with me. But I already have feelings for another man. You can't love two people at the same time."
On the fourth night after her rescue, Rehman boards a plane for the UK wearing blue jeans and an FCUK T-shirt and gripping an emergency passport. Twelve hours later she lands at an airport in the Midlands, where Mujahid is waiting.
Forced marriage is the ugly flipside of arranged marriage, a widespread and highly valued tradition in south Asia. Parents play a central role in such unions, carefully vetting their children's partners. The criteria often depend on class: the rich look for a western education and a decent income; poorer classes worry about caste and creed. Only the most liberal Pakistani families indulge in what are disparagingly referred to as "love marriages". Still, young people can usually refuse to go ahead if they don't like their prospective partner. But in a forced marriage there is no consent, just the brutally imposed wishes of the family. "This is a patriarchal society where women and children are considered as the possessions of males. They have no options, no say, no choices," says Khalida Salimi of Sach.
British citizens also become trapped in forced marriages in other countries. Diplomats have carried out rescues in India and Bangladesh, as well as Africa and the Middle East. But no other country comes close in scale to Pakistan, which has an estimated 80,000 dual nationals and accounts for 60% of cases handled by the Foreign Office's Forced Marriage Unit. One-fifth of cases involve men but none has yet been rescued, the unit instead helping with travel papers and money.
Three years ago Ayesha Bari, a 23-year-old Bradford woman, came under intense pressure to get married. "My mother was crying and all upset. She said, 'Do whatever you want but your father is pressuring me.'" Bari left home, so enraging her father that he had her kidnapped by three men who surrounded her at Milton Keynes railway station. The next day she was on a plane for Pakistan.
In Kashmir, Bari started to get used to the slow pace of life, and even started teaching in a local school. But when she started a relationship with a Pakistani man last year who was deemed to be from the wrong caste, her father threatened to electrocute her. "He put the wires in the socket and said, 'I'm going to kill you.' My granddad had to stop him. Then he whipped me with the wires, while the rest of the family were watching," she says. "He had such force and anger that nobody could pull him back. His sisters had to lock him into another room, to cool him down."
Bari was saved six months ago by a 26-year-old man from London whom she met on an internet chat room and who alerted the Foreign Office. Five weeks later Turner and Albert Davis, the other Pakistani member of the rescue team, came to the door. She fled, taking her 18-year-old sister with her. "If my father had not pressured me so much, then I might have agreed to what he wanted. There are plenty of girls in happy, arranged marriages," she says the following day, sitting in the Islamabad hostel. "But it was all about respect. Pakistanis only look at what others think of them. For my father that was more important than his children's happiness.
"I feel sorry for him. I wouldn't say that I hate him but I don't love him either. He's lost it. He's dug his own grave."
Sach has tried to spark a debate on forced marriage through the media and visits by Muslim scholars to debunk myths about women's role in Islam. "Forced marriage is part of our customs and traditions. It has nothing to do with the law and religion. In fact, it is the very opposite," says Dr Noreen Khalid, who counsels the runaway brides. Sach's efforts have met with stiff, occasionally violent resistance. A Sach driver who was helping a couple to elope was kidnapped and badly beaten for several hours in Rawalpindi.
Repercussions against the women themselves are far worse. One forced marriage victim had her nose, tongue and hair chopped off, says Salimi. Another was killed. "I remember the girl well; she stayed with us in 2000 before going to Britain," says Salimi. "The next year she returned to reconcile with the family, then she was found dead. They say she slipped, fell into a canal and drowned. We think it was murder."
A safe return to Britain, however, does not always spell the end of the story. Now back in Britain, Bari is currently living in a women's shelter in London, surviving on the £200 monthly jobseekers' allowance and struggling to find a job. "They all want work experience, even McDonalds. I try to tell them I've been abroad for the past three years but nobody wants to listen."
Rehman, meanwhile, is living in a council flat, surviving on jobseekers' allowance and seeking advice on how to divorce her Pakistani husband. But the reunion with Mujahid has not been quite the honeymoon she expected. After the initial excitement of her return, the relationship has come under pressure. "It's all messed up," she says. "His mum doesn't like me and I don't know what to do. She doesn't approve of me because I'm a runaway girl. He says he wants to be with me, but I'm not sure."
Despite everything, she would like to reconcile with her father, but he refuses. "He won't accept what I did. First he gave my mum a hard time, saying it was all her fault. Now it's my husband they are blaming. I'm stuck in the middle again".
· The names of victims and their home towns have been changed.
Every year, hundreds of young Britons are forced into marriage in Pakistan against their will. Who can they turn to? Perhaps a team of unlikely British diplomats can help. Declan Walsh joins them at work
Declan Walsh Friday December 9, 2005
Guardian
Almost free, Yasmin Rehman darts breathlessly through the sleepy Punjabi village. Running down a sandy lane, the 21-year-old from Bradford heads for the main road, her green shalwar kameez streaming in her wake. Behind her, clutching a hastily packed suitcase, is a British diplomat and, by his side, a Pakistani bodyguard, a pistol concealed under his clothes.
A Land Rover is waiting at the end of the path. Rehman leaps in and the jeep roars off, weaving around donkeys, tractors and a gaggle of curious kids. For a moment she sits tensely, her hands gripping the back seat and her eyes fixed forward.
"I'm so embarrassed, I'm really scared, I've never done anything like this before. But I had no choice," she babbles nervously in a strong northern accent. She has just escaped a nightmare: Rehman has been thrashed by her father, threatened at gunpoint by her uncle and forced to marry a complete stranger. "I can't trust my family, never again," she says. "Next time they could kill me."
Caught between cultures and pressured by their families, hundreds of young British-Pakistani women are trapped in forced marriages in Pakistan every year. The ordeal results in tears, trauma and sometimes brutal domestic violence. But it usually starts innocently. Parents prod the young women to fly back to Pakistan for a short holiday to visit an ailing granny or celebrate a cousin's wedding. Then it all goes wrong. The weeks stretch into months. Passports go missing and return flights are cancelled. Mysterious suitors appear on the relatives' doorstep. A sour truth dawns on the woman: the wedding being planned is her own.
The parents, eager for what they regard as a good marriage, apply emotional pressure or, failing that, may resort to violence. Running away is rarely an option: male relatives keep a jealous eye and in small-town Pakistan a woman doing anything alone, even walking to a bus, triggers alarm bells.
There is one hope: the diplomatic snatch squad. Such is the plight of dual nationals caught in forced marriages that a special team has been established inside the British High Commission in Islamabad to rescue them. On average, diplomatic jeeps leave the high-walled compound for the villages of Punjab and Kashmir twice a week. Their mission: to pluck the reluctant brides from the clutches of their cousins, whisk them to safety and put them on a plane back to the UK. Last year the team saved 105 young people, according to Helen Feather, head of the consular section and leader of the team. Most are between 18 and 24, although the youngest was 14. "This is a human rights abuse and these are British nationals in distress," she says.
The pioneering programme is sensitive and secretive, plunging British officials into a fraught world of clashing cultures and family traumas; the Guardian is the first media organisation to accompany the team on a mission. Consular official Jon Turner is in charge of Rehman's rescue. With his grey hair and mild manners, Turner does not look like a typical dashing hero, though he has helped dozens of young women to escape.
The hunt begins one bright morning as Turner's high commission jeep is rushing through eastern Punjab. Turner's phone rings: it's Rehman. "It will be OK," Turner assures her. "Stay calm, act natural, we don't want them to get suspicious. And hang on to this phone. That's the most important thing." He hangs up. "The girls get incredibly worried at this stage," he says. "So do we, but we try not to show it."
According to Turner, the rescues often follow a similar pattern. A worried relative or boyfriend in the UK usually makes the initial contact with the Foreign Office. Sometimes the victim herself sends an SOS. Through hushed late-night conversations and secretive text messages, Turner and his team establish contact. After days or weeks of careful preparation, a time and date are agreed.
The element of surprise is crucial, he says. Local police are informed hours beforehand, and asked to provide back-up. Some officers are sympathetic; others need persuading. Finally, Turner knocks on the front door. What follows, he admits, is a wrenching experience for everyone.
Flustered relatives plead with the girl to stay, often resorting to emotional blackmail. "The family can be very tough and vitriolic," says Turner. "They say, 'Your father will have a heart attack,' 'Your mother will commit suicide,' 'You will bring dishonour to our family.'" The team can do little other than to remind relatives that any trouble could reflect poorly in future visa applications. The victim, says Turner, almost always feels guilty. "That's why we try to make it quick."
After escaping, the young woman is rushed to Islamabad and lodged in a refuge run by Struggle for Change (Sach), a Pakistani organisation that supports victims of forced marriage and domestic violence. The high commission will issue an emergency passport and, if necessary, loan her the price of her plane fare home. The address of the refuge is kept secret in case furious relatives try to snatch the woman back. Within a few days she travels to the airport; in high-risk cases she may be hidden under a shawl, flown out from a regional airport or escorted on to the plane.
Most rescues are resolved peacefully, Turner stresses. But in a country where so-called "honour killings" - in which reluctant family members, usually young women, are murdered rather than bring dishonour on the family - are frequent, the dangers are real. An armed bodyguard comes on every rescue. During one encounter, police cocked their weapons and formed a circle around the woman as they left the house. "It turned out her uncle was a well known kidnapper, extortionist and murderer," says Turner. In other cases, stealth is required. Last July Razia, a 19-year-old woman from Luton, was betrothed against her will to her 16-year-old cousin. Her only chance of escape was at 4am, during a family trip to Islamabad airport to see off an aunt travelling abroad. In the melee of the packed concourse Razia slipped away to find Ghazala Shah, one of two Pakistani officials on the rescue team, waiting by the toilets. As the two women walked towards the entrance, Turner was waiting in his car, and they leaped inside. "It was all done in less than 10 seconds," he says.
Rehman's rescue is comparatively easy. A perky, whippet-thin young woman, she blames the trouble on her dad, a Bradford taxi driver. "He's a bit old fashioned. He didn't like English clothes; he burned my jeans once. He didn't like girls going out and about," she says. But most of all, he didn't like the idea of her boyfriend, Mujahid. Although he is also a British Pakistani, Rehman's father believed he was from the wrong caste. So last February he sent Rehman on a five-week holiday to her cousin's in eastern Punjab. It was to last eight months.
She might have seen it coming. Rehman knew of several other girls whose passports had been burned, and her parents had already tried to marry her off once, when she was 17. That time she feigned illness and was sent back to the UK. But this time there was no escape. The marriage took place in June, to a 23-year-old architect from Gujranwala. At the wedding feast Rehman wept until makeup streamed down her face, while her father and father-in-law heaped gold rings and bangles on her. Relatives thought it a show, part of a Punjabi custom where newly-weds show their sorrow at leaving their family. "They thought I was sad to be leaving them," she says. "I just wanted to get away."
Predictably, married life was a disaster. Rehman scandalised her new in-laws by refusing to sleep with her husband, Ishfan. "It was like living as strangers. I used to sleep in the house, he was on a bed outside. I think he used to count the stars," she says. She resented the constricted life of a rural Pakistani woman; back in the UK she had earned her own money as a cashier in Safeways and Poundland and was used to going out with her friends. She pined for burgers, chips and jeans. Arguments erupted with her sister-in-law. "She was a bitch. She used to talk about me to her friends, saying I just slept all day. I said, 'I'm no fucking slave, why should I do all the work?'"
Finally, she told Ishfan she was already in love with another man. Her father and uncle beat her brutally, demanding to know Mujahid's address in Bradford. "They said, 'Watch what we will do to him, we will break his legs.'" Her uncle ordered her to surrender her mobile phone. When she refused he pulled out a gun and pointed it at her head.
"He said, 'You don't deserve to live'. I started crying and told him I had thrown the phone away. Then my dad came in and hit me some more," she says. That night Rehman waited until everyone else had gone to bed before texting Mujahid. Then she carefully hid the phone in a bag of sanitary pads. "They wouldn't dream of looking in there," she says with a smile.
By the time the snatch squad arrive, Rehman's father and uncle have returned to their jobs as taxi drivers in England. Only her grandmother and an aunt are home. They swear at Rehman in Punjabi and urge her to stay. But it is too late; she signs a police statement and leaves.
Sitting in a riverside cafe, Rehman's initial elation has been swamped by a tide of doubt and uncertainty. "I feel so depressed now, so stressed out," she says, pulling on a cigarette. "I just want to put it all behind me and get back to the UK." During the meal Shah's phone rings. It is Ishfan, begging his wife to come back. Rehman refuses the call. He wasn't a bad guy, she says; he was just the wrong guy. "I feel sorry for him. He wanted to have kids and stay with me. But I already have feelings for another man. You can't love two people at the same time."
On the fourth night after her rescue, Rehman boards a plane for the UK wearing blue jeans and an FCUK T-shirt and gripping an emergency passport. Twelve hours later she lands at an airport in the Midlands, where Mujahid is waiting.
Forced marriage is the ugly flipside of arranged marriage, a widespread and highly valued tradition in south Asia. Parents play a central role in such unions, carefully vetting their children's partners. The criteria often depend on class: the rich look for a western education and a decent income; poorer classes worry about caste and creed. Only the most liberal Pakistani families indulge in what are disparagingly referred to as "love marriages". Still, young people can usually refuse to go ahead if they don't like their prospective partner. But in a forced marriage there is no consent, just the brutally imposed wishes of the family. "This is a patriarchal society where women and children are considered as the possessions of males. They have no options, no say, no choices," says Khalida Salimi of Sach.
British citizens also become trapped in forced marriages in other countries. Diplomats have carried out rescues in India and Bangladesh, as well as Africa and the Middle East. But no other country comes close in scale to Pakistan, which has an estimated 80,000 dual nationals and accounts for 60% of cases handled by the Foreign Office's Forced Marriage Unit. One-fifth of cases involve men but none has yet been rescued, the unit instead helping with travel papers and money.
Three years ago Ayesha Bari, a 23-year-old Bradford woman, came under intense pressure to get married. "My mother was crying and all upset. She said, 'Do whatever you want but your father is pressuring me.'" Bari left home, so enraging her father that he had her kidnapped by three men who surrounded her at Milton Keynes railway station. The next day she was on a plane for Pakistan.
In Kashmir, Bari started to get used to the slow pace of life, and even started teaching in a local school. But when she started a relationship with a Pakistani man last year who was deemed to be from the wrong caste, her father threatened to electrocute her. "He put the wires in the socket and said, 'I'm going to kill you.' My granddad had to stop him. Then he whipped me with the wires, while the rest of the family were watching," she says. "He had such force and anger that nobody could pull him back. His sisters had to lock him into another room, to cool him down."
Bari was saved six months ago by a 26-year-old man from London whom she met on an internet chat room and who alerted the Foreign Office. Five weeks later Turner and Albert Davis, the other Pakistani member of the rescue team, came to the door. She fled, taking her 18-year-old sister with her. "If my father had not pressured me so much, then I might have agreed to what he wanted. There are plenty of girls in happy, arranged marriages," she says the following day, sitting in the Islamabad hostel. "But it was all about respect. Pakistanis only look at what others think of them. For my father that was more important than his children's happiness.
"I feel sorry for him. I wouldn't say that I hate him but I don't love him either. He's lost it. He's dug his own grave."
Sach has tried to spark a debate on forced marriage through the media and visits by Muslim scholars to debunk myths about women's role in Islam. "Forced marriage is part of our customs and traditions. It has nothing to do with the law and religion. In fact, it is the very opposite," says Dr Noreen Khalid, who counsels the runaway brides. Sach's efforts have met with stiff, occasionally violent resistance. A Sach driver who was helping a couple to elope was kidnapped and badly beaten for several hours in Rawalpindi.
Repercussions against the women themselves are far worse. One forced marriage victim had her nose, tongue and hair chopped off, says Salimi. Another was killed. "I remember the girl well; she stayed with us in 2000 before going to Britain," says Salimi. "The next year she returned to reconcile with the family, then she was found dead. They say she slipped, fell into a canal and drowned. We think it was murder."
A safe return to Britain, however, does not always spell the end of the story. Now back in Britain, Bari is currently living in a women's shelter in London, surviving on the £200 monthly jobseekers' allowance and struggling to find a job. "They all want work experience, even McDonalds. I try to tell them I've been abroad for the past three years but nobody wants to listen."
Rehman, meanwhile, is living in a council flat, surviving on jobseekers' allowance and seeking advice on how to divorce her Pakistani husband. But the reunion with Mujahid has not been quite the honeymoon she expected. After the initial excitement of her return, the relationship has come under pressure. "It's all messed up," she says. "His mum doesn't like me and I don't know what to do. She doesn't approve of me because I'm a runaway girl. He says he wants to be with me, but I'm not sure."
Despite everything, she would like to reconcile with her father, but he refuses. "He won't accept what I did. First he gave my mum a hard time, saying it was all her fault. Now it's my husband they are blaming. I'm stuck in the middle again".
· The names of victims and their home towns have been changed.
