His cousin tried to convince me to go back to him.
I told him I won’t.
He said, “Do it for the girls.”
I told him, “Growing up with a mother and father, who are divorced, but respect one another, is so much better than living with two people who hate each other.”

I’m 32 years old.
I’m divorced, and I don’t have any children.
When I turned 32, everyone pressured me into getting married.
I honestly wasn’t really looking forward to it.

My father used to beat me up pretty badly over trivial things.
I used to get beaten if I used the bathroom too many times at school,
Or for telling my teacher that my father was being hard on me.

Her brother overheard her speaking to him on the phone at night,
So he grabbed her, pulling her by the hair, and beat her up.
The next day her face was bruised.
He chopped her hair off and made her take off her veil.

I was playing down in the street the first time I was hit.
One of the girls I was playing with hit me.
I went to her house,
And started throwing rocks at it,
But she didn’t come out.
I went up to her house,
And her mother answered the door.
I went inside and started hitting her.
“Aren’t you a bold little girl?”
Her mother exclaimed.

I wanted to be a boy when I was young.
My brother and our cousins would be allowed to play in the garden behind our house until late, but not me.
They used to hop the fence, play hooky, then come back and lie about it, make up stories.
As for me, if I even so much as tried to call my cousin at night they’d tell me
“Why? Aren’t you going to see each other tomorrow morning?

I’m in my late twenties.
When I was 5 years old,
Something happened that made me quite mad at my parents.
I saw baba beating mama.
I remember sitting on the floor in their room crying,
terrified of the violence I was witnessing.
She fell next to me when he was beating her.

When I was a 13-year-old girl,
My parents were a little strict with me.
But they’re my parents,
And I could never let go of them.
When I grew up,
I knew that we couldn’t function as a normal family.
I was subjected to violence by my mother and father.
My siblings too.

I am a 23-year-old guy.
I come from a well-known family.
I graduated a year ago from business school.
From the moment I was born,
My life has been full of suffering.
My father was very harsh on me and my siblings,
But I was almost the only one affected by his cruelty.
He used to beat me over the smallest mistakes.
He used to humiliate me,
Call me names in front of people,
And degrade me in front of my friends.

When my father died,
My brother decided he’d be the man of the house.
That didn’t mean that he’d help us.
It meant my sisters and I would be his servants.