![]() ![]() ![]() Her father, meanwhile, took a second wife, then a third, both much younger than their anguished mother, who seemed to wreak her wrath on her rebellious daughter. ![]() Slapped, abused, dragged from school and hidden away, Rahaf was treated as a family curse. When she cut her hair short, spoke back in class and was caught kissing girls, all her mother’s fears were realised. As a teenager, Rahaf began to test boundaries at home. From the age of nine, she was fully covered in a shapeless black abaya and niqab, anonymous to the rest of the world, and condemned to a small, ambitionless life, the course of which she had little role in shaping. Rahaf, meanwhile, couldn’t sit on a balcony, go to the mall without a male guardian, or even speak in the GP’s clinic. Her brothers in the city of Ha’il played with friends on the streets, made their own decisions and monitored her phones. ![]() Archaic traditions that have kept women as chattels remain steadfast beliefs among Rahaf’s family. In regional Saudi Arabia, the cultural reforms announced over the past five years are yet to cut through. In the weeks and months that followed, her ordeal also cast a spotlight on her homeland: a place where “rebels” such as her are still the source of immense shame and young women remain barely seen or heard. The maelstrom that followed involved the governments of five countries as well as the UN, drawing the attention of the world’s media to a vulnerable woman at a stark impasse in a faraway land. ![]()
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