By Keziah Mendez —
Sylvie Yasmina met the man of her dreams in Australia. It didn’t matter that she was French and he was Pakistani. Love transcends all differences.
Or so she thought.
Twelve years later, Yasmina has been freed by police. Her husband beat her and her children daily and kept them imprisoned in a decrepit room in Bara of the mountainous Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
“We were deprived [of our] freedom, my husband didn’t take care of us the way he should as a husband and the father of my children. He beats us and put pressure on our lives on a daily basis,” Yasmina wrote in her statement to the police, as reported by the BBC.
Guess what religion and cultural context favored this sort of abuse.
The Pakistani man has been arrested after a son managed to escape and alert police. Police found Yasmina and her five children in a cramped and “extremely dilapidated room”, with bruises all over their bodies.
He was “very violent,” Yasmina said.
Yasmina and her children have been taken to a women’s shelter in Peshawar. They plan to move back to France, police say.
According to Yasmina, 54, her husband had “effectively imprisoned” the family since they moved to Pakistan from Australia in 2014.
“According to the woman… She was not allowed to meet anyone, their two older children had missed their studies, while the three younger children were born in Pakistan and never enrolled in school,” a senior police officer told BBC Urdu.
They married in 2003 and lived in Australia until 2014, when they moved to Pakistan with their two older children. Yasmina claims she has not had any communication with the outside world since then.
“I felt that my future was already ruined,” she is reported as saying. “The future of the children would also be ruined.”
