ORIGINATUNG Source: https://be4gen.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/palestnian-women-locked-in-bathroom-for-10-years/
PALESTNIAN WOMEN LOCKED IN BATHROOM FOR 10 YEARS
Palestinian woman locked in bathroom for 10 years
AFP, AP, AAP January 24, 2012, 2:40 am
Baraa Melhem poses for a photograph at her mother’s house in the West Bank village of Qalandia, near Ramallah. Photo: AAP
A 21-year-old Palestinian woman has told authorities she was locked in a bathroom for the past decade by her father, who let her out only in the dead of night so she could clean their house.
“People are monsters,” Baraa Melhem said her father would tell her, according to a social worker dealing with the case.
Palestinian police said Monday they freed Melhem from the small bathroom of a home in the West Bank city of Qalqilya on Saturday after an anonymous tip.
Her father, who holds Israeli citizenship, was arrested and handed over to Israeli authorities. He is due to appear in an Israeli court Wednesday, an Israeli police spokesman said.
Ms Melhem told Voice of Palestine radio that when she was 11, her father confined her to the toilet and did not allow her to go to school or see her mother, whom he had divorced.
“I don’t hate my father. But I hate what he did to me. Why did he do it? I don’t understand.”
Of her new home, she said: “This is heaven. Because you have always been free, you don’t appreciate it. But for somebody like me, who has tasted the bitterness of a prison, this is heaven.”
She was beaten with a baton and metal wires and given only one blanket to keep her warm, said the social worker, Hala Shreim.
“The bathroom was only 1-1/2 meters big, it was like a cell,” Shreim said.
According to a statement issued by Palestinian police, the father, citing a “family dispute,” admitted to locking up his daughter and feeding her mainly bread.
Ms Melhem told Voice of Palestine that her father used to shave her hair and her eyebrows, and allowed her to shower only once a month. He would let her out of the bathroom every night at 1 a.m. to clean the house until 4 a.m., she added.
Ms Melhem’s father, the social worker said, often encouraged his daughter to commit suicide.
“I have joy now. My life has begun,” the young woman, dressed in red sweat pants, white shoes, a black shawl for warmth and a headscarf, told Associated Press.
Adnan Damiri, a Palestinian police spokesman, said she was in “deplorable” condition.
Ms Melhem said she was beaten, barely fed and let out only in the middle of the night to do housework. She was given only a blanket, radio and a razor blade by her father and stepmother, and both of them encouraged her to kill herself.
Miss Melhem said she was first locked up in a bathroom after she ran away from home when she was 10. Police brought her home, and her father forced her to sign a statement saying she didn’t want to go back to school.
“Fear, fear, fear – that was the basis of my life,” she said.
She dreamed of fleeing, but Melhem said her father threatened to rape her until she became pregnant if she tried to escape.
Then he warned he would kill her and justify the crime by saying that she had shamed the family – what is known in Arab society as “honor killing”.
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