Gazing from the bedroom window of the house that was her virtual prison for two years, Ayesha would fantasise about what it might feel like to be free. The bright and articulate teenager had been locked away because her refusal to marry her first cousin made her a threat to her family’s sense of honour.

Her scars and bruises told of a battle that was being waged between a proud Afghani-Pakistani family and a girl, born and educated in Britain, whose desire for independence had become their badge of shame.

Fast-forward two years to last summer. Ayesha, by then 20, had escaped. She had a new name and a new home in a town far removed from her family. As she prepared to start a degree course she said that she felt proud to be British and was loving the sense of being young, free and single.

Freedom had been won at the price of severing all ties with her past, however. Against advice, she started ringing a relative. Promises were made.

She could come back. All would be forgiven. Four months ago, Ayesha went home. And so resumed her role as victim in an escalating cycle of threats and violence. The family is still insisting that she marry her cousin. She still refuses. A happy ending is not in sight.

Ayesha’s life has been a long story of bullying, beatings and betrayal. It began on the day that she, aged 6, and her elder brother came home from their private school in the South of England to find a strange man in the house. He gave her an order that she refused to follow and he slapped her, hard, in the face. It was her first encounter with the man who was to become her stepfather.

Until her the death of her father, life had been good. A successful businessman who was happy to wear Western clothes and make British friends, he wanted his family to be a part of the society in which they had chosen to live. His sudden death led Ayesha’s mother to marry his first cousin, who wore traditional Asian clothes, had a strict, conservative Islamic faith and was obsessed by what he saw as the corrupting threat posed by the West.

By the age of 15, Ayesha was regularly being beaten for disobedience. Her mother used a belt, her stepfather his fists. After one punch she was unable fully to open her mouth for weeks.

One Saturday, she woke to be told by her mother that it was going to be a special day. The extended family descended, she was dressed for the occasion, a ceremony proceeded and by the end of the day she was engaged to her 21-year-old cousin. “I was 15. I was in a state of complete shock. I didn’t know what to do. There was no one I could talk to,” she said. She ran away to East London with her best friend but was tricked into returning home for yet another beating.

Ayesha eventually found the courage to tell a GP about the physical abuse. “He said he couldn’t do anything because there was no proof. What I didn’t know was that he then contacted the social services, who went to my house while I was at school and spoke to my mother, who denied everything. That night I got my worst beating ever.”

School had become a place of refuge. Ayesha had been ordered to wear the hijab but would remove it at the school gates and put it on when she left. “I was one person at school and another at home. At school, I had lots of friends and I could say what I wanted. I loved Sunday nights, but I used to hate Friday afternoons.”

Her stepfather spied on her and one day saw her without the hijab. That evening, she was thrown into the bath and beaten. “My mother told me that if I didn’t start listening to her then my stepfather was going to rape me.” Ayesha confided in a female teacher, but her story was not believed.

As preparations for the marriage moved forward, the bride-to-be was locked in a house whose outside walls were now topped with studded nails and barbed wire. Her stepfather spelt it out bluntly. If she tried to run away again, he would find her and kill her.

Ayesha had hidden under her bed a woman’s magazine containing an article about Jasvinder Sanghera and the Karma Nirvana women’s project that she founded for victims of honour-related violence. It had a help-line number. One Saturday lunchtime, a volunteer helper at the project was shopping when she answered her mobile phone and found herself listening to “a trembling, terrified voice”.

Ayesha, her parents having gone shopping, had finally made the call. Within minutes, she was speaking directly to Ms Sanghera, who asked whether there was any way she could escape from the house. In desperation, she searched through the pockets of her stepfather’s coats and jackets. In one she found the keys to the patio door.

“I ran down the street, then down an alleyway and hid in someone’s garden. I was still talking to Jas on the phone and she said I had to phone the police.”

When they arrived, the officers listened to Ayesha’s story then told her that this was clearly “a family tiff” and they were going to take her back home. It was at this moment that Ms Sanghera may have saved Ayesha’s life. She persuaded the police to take the girl to their station, then contacted a senior Metropolitan Police commander who had expertise in dealing with forced marriages and honour violence. He made sure that she was taken to safety.

What followed were death threats, refuges, the witness protection programme and finally a new life that seemed to hold much promise.

Trapped in her bedroom three years ago, Ayesha wrote a short poem that explored the tension of being suspended between two cultures:

If I was born under a Pakistani sun
Then maybe I could see.
But I was born under an English sun.
I want my life to be free.

For Ayesha, to have family means no freedom; freedom means no family. She is now staying with a cousin and feels that she has neither.

Ayesha is not her real name.

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