Farhat grew up in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, a conservative part of the country where the majority of the population are Pashtun. Out of step with mainstream society, her mother insisted that local custom should be defied and Farhat should be university educated.
After university she had an arranged marriage to a man of her father’s choice. A few years into the marriage, her husband developed shizophrenia and became increasingly violent towards her. Eventually, after years of abuse and fearing for her own safety and that of her three children, she left him and returned to live with her parents. Her parents felt that she had brought dishonour on the family.
She remembers her mother telling her “it is a woman’s destiny, violence, it is a woman’s place, she has to take it. And you’re no different from other women, you should have born it too.”
Under great pressure from her family to restore their honour, Farhat finally agreed to remarry. Her second husband was from a wealthy Pachtun family, and was against Farhat working. At the time she was head of the gender and development program in a provincial NGO.
The abuse started soon into the marriage – both to Farhat and her children. Her parents refused to take her back a second time and she felt she had no choice but to remain in the marriage. She says that her hands were tied by Pakistani family law which gives custody of children over 7 years of age to the father if he can prove the mother is morally corrupt.
When Farhat’s daughters were 5 and 7 years old, her mother-in-law had them engaged to her two other grandsons, who were then 15 years older than the girls and known for their violence. She had no say in the forced marriages.
Farhat takes up the story.
“I also knew – because he told me - that he would never divorce me. He said, ‘if you ever even mention the word divorce I’m going to kill you’”.
“So I decided to leave Pakistan. I knew that we didn’t have any hope, I knew that my family was not going to help me, the courts were not going to help me, the law was against me and I knew that all traditions were against me. My husband was influential enough that if I ever decided to leave him he wouldn’t let me live.”
At the time, Farhat was based at the British Council in Pakistan and working for the British government’s Department for International Development (DFID).
“Once the plane was in the air I thought: at least we have some hope now… but I was leaving all my family, my job, all that I had worked for all these years. My parents were very old and I knew I would never see them again. It was very, very difficult.”
On landing at Heathrow, Farhat and her children claimed asylum.
“Perhaps I was very naïve then also, perhaps because I worked for DFID and the British Council as part of there women’s rights agent, and because I had seen how on their agenda women’s rights was right on top and they always put pressure on the Pakistan government to give more rights to women, I somehow believed that when I came to the UK that they would be very sympathetic towards me… I wasn’t prepared to be treated the way that I was."
“It started from the moment we landed here and it went right through the whole 7 years that our asylum claim lasted. I still remember the immigration officers just started shouting at me, I’m going to send you back on the next plane, enjoy your holiday Mrs Khan, and then go back to your home”.
Two months after they arrived, Farhat and her children were transferred to Manchester.
