Skip to content
Home » I Was Abused as a Child Bride and This is What I Learned by Samra Zafar (Transcript)

I Was Abused as a Child Bride and This is What I Learned by Samra Zafar (Transcript)

Samra Zafar

Here is the full transcript of Samra Zafar’s TEDx Talk: I Was Abused as a Child Bride and This is What I Learned at TEDxMississauga conference. 

Samra Zafar: I’d like to invite all of you to take part in a little exercise with me. Don’t worry, you don’t have to get up.

Please close your eyes for a few moments and imagine yourself in a dark box. A confined space with no light, no sound, except that of your own breathing, enough air that you can breathe, but not enough that you can breathe freely. You feel trapped, suffocated and helpless.

Now imagine you’re going to be in that box forever. That is what abuse feels like.

Now please open your eyes. I’m Samra Zafar, and I’m a survivor of abuse. I grew up in a small town in Abu Dhabi, in many ways a brash, rebellious teenager, a girl who always liked to push the envelopes and challenge the stereotypes. While my friends dreamed of weddings and bangles, I dreamed of going to Harvard or Stanford. The founder of the girls’ cricket team, editor of the school newspaper, a straight-A student.

But I was also a girl who was growing up too fast. My body developing into that of a young woman, I was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. And one day, when I was 16 years old, I was told that in a few months, I was going to be married to a man 12 years older than me, who I’d never met before, who lives in a faraway country called Canada.

A year later, I arrived in this country as a child bride in a forced marriage with only one dream; the dream of getting an education. I became a mother right away.

I gave birth to my older daughter at 18 – I had no idea about birth control – and that dream of education was snatched away from me.