The warning signs were there from the beginning, now she thinks about it. Rima* was 18 and studying at a Syrian university when her family arranged for her to marry a man several years older than she was.
“From the moment we were married he controlled me,” she says. “I actually agreed to marry him because I wanted to run away from my father’s violence. My brother told me later: you ran from your father’s violence to even worse violence. If I had been more mature I would have waited a bit before getting married. But I was 18.” She sits cross-legged on the floor of a cold house, cradling one of her young sons, half laughing, half crying.
