The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [52]
At the police headquarters of the vice squad in The Hague, I meet Anab’s and Shukri’s sister. I have been asked to be an interpreter for this heavily pregnant Somali woman, who is wearing a headscarf. She greets me and immediately asks, “Who do you belong to?” Which means: “From which clan are you?” I say that in my capacity of interpreter I am not allowed to answer such questions. But as I am a Somali woman, she wants to know because of the things that are going to be discussed. I refuse again, explaining that I am sworn to secrecy.
She tells the police that she, her two sisters, and her half brother are all related on their father’s side. In those circumstances a half brother is seen as a full brother. The police ask her in detail about the perpetrator. Did she know that he was sexually abusing her sisters? Does he have a history of abusing women and girls? Does he always follow the same pattern? And so on. She takes half an hour or more to tell the police how perfectly virtuous her family is: that it is just this boy; that sexual abuse never occurs among Somali people; that this is a curse. Finally she demands a full investigation of the case to check whether it really happened. The woman is thoroughly confused. She wonders how she can put it right.
I find out many details about the case: when it began, how it began, who reported it, and that the man did not only abuse the two girls but regularly raped and violated his wife as well.
Approximately one week later my niece Maryan comes to live with me. At the weekend she asks me if I can pick her up from an address in Utrecht. She wants to visit a friend whom she knows from her first days in the Netherlands. They were both assigned to the care of De Opbouw, the trust in charge of underage asylum seekers, and have become friends: young girls who have fun together and enjoy wearing high heels.
At the address in Utrecht I find an unbelievable mess. The whole house stinks of urine. Two toddlers—no older than one and two years—are puttering about in nappies that they have been wearing for far too long. Dirty nappies are lying around everywhere. My niece’s friend, whose house we are visiting, is called Anab. She offers us tea and disappears into the kitchen. We are kept waiting for a long time.
While I am sitting there on the sofa with Maryan, and Anab is making us tea (I suspect she cannot find anything; we never get any tea), Maryan says, “You see those videotapes over there? That’s all pornography. Hard porn. Anab’s husband rents them. He forces Anab to watch them and to do all the crazy things shown in the video. He rapes her anally; she has to put up with horrible things.”
I recognize the story: this is the same Anab as the one I came across in the file at the police station in The Hague. While the man who raped and traumatized Anab is behind bars, her family has managed to find a cousin prepared to marry her, despite the fact that she is no longer a virgin. The sexual abuse—which, according to the sister—has “never before happened in our family”—has been swept under the carpet, and the family name has been cleared.
On inquiry it emerges that Anab was married to her cousin as soon as she reached eighteen. From that age the young asylum seekers no longer fall under the care of the Opbouw Trust. Presumably her cousin, for whatever reason, had been unable to find a wife. The family said to him: “We have a wife for you, but you’ll have to keep your mouth shut about what happened to her.” After years of abuse by her half brother, Anab is now suffering the abuse of her cousin, whom she has been forced to marry.
Anab ran away from home more than once, and on several occasions she was removed from the house by social services, but she went back each time. Through a neighbor she was helped to settle in a shelter for abused women for a while, until her husband picked her up and took her home. Sa-ied is in prison because he sexually abused Anab, but her husband, who treats her