‘First he raped me. Then he came for my sisters’

*Aishath Ali was able to rush aboard an overcrowded ferry with her life’s belongings in one bag before her family noticed she was gone.

It was too late to stop the 16-year-old from escaping the brutal shackles of home. But, as the boat sailed away from her island, it was too late for Aishath to save her sisters from the ordeal endured at the hands of her mother and the elderly man who stole her childhood.

“I had no option but to leave,” she told the Maldives Independent 11 years later, recalling her mother’s attempts to force her to marry a man almost 50 years her senior. A man who had also raped her multiple times. “I will never set foot on that island again.”

She had turned her back on the trauma, but is haunted once again by the image of her rapist with news of her three younger sisters being abused by him.