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Amina didn't report this, but a teacher from her school, who saw the burn mark, did, and Ontario's Children's Aid Society (CAS) made a visit to the family home, where they interviewed her parents, who said the burn was the result of an accident. Amina recalls that her father was "very angry" because she had "brought kāfir people [unbelievers] into the house." Amina was just seven years old.Yet, more violence was to come. At the time, Amina—who, by now, at the age of 13, could speak uninhibited—was working with her father at the madrassa, helping to teach classical Arabic and the Quran. She was late for a class. "My dad was furious with me," she remembers, describing how he beat her so badly that he broke her wrist. Her aunt took her to the hospital because of the pain, and Amina was interviewed by a case-worker from CAS. "I said I had accidentally tripped.""My dad was furious with me," she remembers, describing how he beat her so badly that he broke her wrist.
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Kiran Opal, a human rights activist and a co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA), is intimately familiar with Amina's case, not only because she has directly helped her but because she has been there herself and has had to fight off similar parental pressures, despite coming from what she describes as a "liberal" Muslim family.EXMNA, which was founded in 2013 in Toronto and Washington, provides a support network for ex-Muslims, helping them deal with the loneliness and stigma associated with leaving Islam. "There's great animosity toward ex-Muslims," Opal says. "You're treated like a traitor, just for not believing the same thing. And you're expected to keep your mouth shut and not criticize the religion."Speaking to the issue of forced marriage in Muslim communities in Canada, Opal says that for many young Muslim women "there is no option: if they want to have a choice in who they marry and who they have sex with for the rest of their lives they have to break out."But breaking out is not easy: "Girls from Muslim immigrant families are trapped, financially and emotionally," she explains. "It's not so simple to go to a shelter or call the cops when you've been raised in a family of ten people living in one house and you have a role and are expected to take care of your younger siblings; and you have this strong emotional tie to your community; and you don't want to hurt your mom and bring shame on her, or hurt your little sister, because now your parents have to be even stricter with her.""It's not so simple to go to a shelter or call the cops when you've been raised in a family of ten people living in one house and you have a role and are expected to take care of your younger siblings."
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