In our home, I was the cat. It was as if my mother took sadistic pleasure in torturing me. It satisfied some pathological need in her. And, unfortunately, she was not alone. In speaking with other ex-Muslim women, I discovered that this pattern of behaviour was remarkably common. Some Saudi Arabian women told me about how their mothers would lock them in a room for months. This is extraordinarily easy to do in a country like Saudi Arabia, where there is no protection for girls who are being abused. Another woman told me of how, after she escaped to the United States and started dating an
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