The Heritage of Cultural Abuse

The day-by-day details oozing out of the courtroom in Kingston where three members of the Shafia family of Montreal are on trial, charged with planning and carrying out the murder of three daughters and the first wife of Mohammad Shafia, paints a painful portrait of a miserable existence of fear and loathing for all four who were found dead in the submerged family vehicle at the Kingston locks.

What is amazing about the lives that the three sisters - 19-year-old Zainab, 17-year-old Sahar and 13-year-old Geeti, along with their 'aunt', Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, led, was the emotional strangulation and physical conflict that was part of their everyday lives. The girls, wanting to be like any other Canadian girls, trusted to be girls in a society that is the polar opposite of the stifling one their family adhered to were desperate to be rescued..

And for their stubbornness, their refusal to obey their father, the Muslim paterfamilias whose word was law, they were threatened, abused, physically assaulted, confined. The girls refused, all of them, to be cowed. They took to subterfuge, the leaving their home modestly dressed as demanded, wearing the hijab.

At their arrival at their high school they replaced their clothing with those that all the other girls wore, and carefully applied make-up. After school, on their return back home, the reverse took place. They were not to be out of the house without express permission. The covert activities of the two older girls in communicating with young boys whom they were interested in was strictly forbidden.

Zainab, who like her sisters, so desperately wished to leave the stifling, cloistered confines of the family home, saw marriage at an early age to be her escape. Escaping to a women's shelter out of fear, speaking to strangers, asking desperately for help, confessing their fear and apprehensions to authority figures whose job it was to protect the young, all turned out to be utterly useless.

The Montreal police service, responding to a plea for help through a 911 call involved Quebec's child and family services department, so the girls were interviewed and related their concerns. They described their constant punishment: corporal and emotional and restrictive, and they spoke of their anxiety to be rescued. Despite which, the agencies set up to help, did nothing.

Their brother, Hamed, was as brutal to his sisters as was their father. Zainab described to her social services interlocutor "physical violence by her brother". In the end, there was no one to rescue the three girls, and their adult companion, their father's first, barren wife who viewed them as her own daughters and was herself scorned and persecuted by the three who murdered them all.

This kind of traditional familial 'solution' to the age-old 'problem' of female submission-gone-awry is an especially horrendous feature of misogynous cultures where women are considered chattel, owned and manipulated by their men.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali described her own situation as a young Somali woman embedded in the clan and tribal culture she was born to in her book, Infidel.

"Mahad (her brother, older by three years than herself) was the man of the house now. Strangely, I think that Mahad was actually relieved when my father left. Abeh always disapproved of his laziness and the way he bullied and bossed us. If we didn't do what Mahad wanted, he hurt us so much that even brave Haweya (her younger sister) did his bidding. Ma never interfered with this; if anything, she encouraged Mahad's authority."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali eventually disowned Islam, and her family disowned her. She, however, lived to tell the tale. The three Shafia sisters and their aunt paid the ultimate price for their intolerable insubordination.

Which their father Mohammad railed against to their mother, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, who with their son Hamed, saw the solution to their 'problems' with the girls as their deaths, to restore the family honour.