 It was not a day like any other in her life. A 17 years old girl standing alone in the middle of the room, 20 eyes staring at her with severe looks, demanding a response. Her answer is short and simple. No. That moment changed the rest of her life. She was beaten, abused, threatened, and kept enclosed in a Quranic madrasa. Even her own family plotted against her. There was no escape, nowhere to flee. If you're now wondering why I'm telling you the story, it's because this is my story. I was born in Pakistan in a small village called Dedar. I lived there with my two brothers, with my sister, and my mother. When I was 10 years old, my father brought us to Austria, where he already lived. And the freedom that I experienced in the West, it was both on the one hand very exciting and fascinating. On the other hand, shocking. I asked myself questions like, why is my neighbor not married but having kids still alive? But although I had these questions, I knew that I don't have to adjust to these people's lifestyle. This is how my mother used to call them. But over the years I realized that in order to be accepted by my Austrian classmates, I had to integrate to their culture to some extent. So my problem started when I was 15 years old. I loved my new life, the lipstick and the jeans, the makeup. And my parents didn't. They didn't want me to adjust to the Western lifestyle so for them, the Western culture was evil. And we were in Europe only to be educated and to go to school. So we fought about swimming lessons, we fought about acting classes, which my father thought were only for prostitutes. And when my mother found out that I had a boyfriend in school and had already killed him, it made me up so brutally that social services had to intervene. In traditional Islamic families, like in mine, we are not accepted as daughters. We are seen as a source of honor. And it's not the fathers who are mostly to blame. It's the mothers. And I think this is even much worse because if your mother beats you and abuses you, you lose your anchor. When my mother was my age, she was settling into an arranged marriage. And she thought it was time for me to do the same. But I refused to marry my cousin in Pakistan that they had chosen for me. That was extremely a shaming and embarrassing for my parents. They lost their face in the Pakistani community. And so they wanted to restore the family's honor and tricked me with a holiday to my relatives in Pakistan. What happened when we got there, I already told you at the beginning. But it even got worse when my father threatened me with death, when I left Islam and converted to Christianity. I fled to Germany in 2004 with the decision to help girls and women who, in order to be free, lose their families and have death threats on their lives. We help those victims of honor-based violence. Every year, 5,000 women are killed by their fathers and brothers in the name of honor. We give those women their dignity. We help them find shelters, give them legal advice. And since 2006, I'm under police protection in Germany. I rarely go out alone. And so I have fought for my freedom and paid a very high price. But if you're now asking yourself, was it really worth it? My answer is short and simple. Yes, thank you.