Disobedient
Ada remembers herself from the age of four. She lived in a small, cosy flat with her mum, dad, little brother and beloved French bulldog Charlie. Asked how she remembers her parents back then, Ada answers without hesitation: “They were good. They always looked after me, fed me; I had everything a child needs. Dad was quite aggressive with everyone, but never with me — he called me his favourite child. Mum would scold me if, say, I broke something; there were times when she hit me a few times, but as for seriously beating me — no, that never happened.”
Both parents trained as teachers, but neither worked in their field: her dad was a car mechanic, her mum a housewife. The family valued obedience, good marks and religious devotion. The parents pinned their hopes mainly on Ada, and she did not let them down: she studied diligently, obeyed her parents and never missed the family’s Sunday prayers.
Problems began when Ada entered adolescence. The girl who had always been meek gradually began “demanding her rights”: she told her parents she knew better how to live her life, who to be friends with and where to go out. In fifth grade, Ada had a conflict with her maths teacher, who called her “stupid”, putting her off cramming formulas and solving geometry problems. Ada began skipping maths first, then the other subjects too. To top it all off, problems with her classmates began.
The large library of adventure books at home, and the internet, became her refuge. Ada developed an interest in Japanese culture, began translating for Wikipedia as a volunteer and won a trip to a camp in one of Armenia’s provinces. Her classmates generally thought Ada was strange, called her a “bookworm” and sometimes advised her to “stop being a know-it-all”.
“I was the shortest in the class, and I was teased more than the others. I would get aggressive in response; I might lash out with my fists at whoever had hurt me.”
Her parents showed no understanding of Ada’s adolescent hormonal changes. Once, her mum beat her for biting her nails.
“She hit me once, shouted at me to stop. But I couldn’t stop then: it calmed me down.”
Another time, her parents beat her for not doing her homework and for not wanting to go to school.
The situation grew worse when her dad left his job and decided to try his hand at business. But his start-ups went under one after another, he lost money, took a job that did not pay very well and became even more on edge.
“I began fighting back against his attacks. I said I didn’t like him shouting at me, and anyway, it was my life and it wasn’t up to him to decide what I did with it. That drove him mad.
After every beating, he insisted it was for my own good, that I’d understand when I grew up. I tried to talk about my problems at school, but my parents always interrupted me and began shouting that it was all my own fault.”
Colours
Ada’s life changed dramatically when she enrolled at medical college and made new friends.
“It’s really important to me to share — thoughts, impressions, feelings; it’s important to find like-minded people. At college we read books and discussed them. People invited me to the cinema and to go out. Before that I’d only been to the cinema about three times, and even then it was with my class. I had to lie to my parents, make up things I had to do at college, so I could go to a film or hang out with people.”
In her third year, Ada met a teacher who taught psychiatry to the senior years.
“I skipped classes and went to his lectures. He really helped me find myself, change my outlook on the world. He said that changes on the inside should start with your appearance. Before I met him, I had two colours in my clothes — white and black. Now I have every colour. And there are colours inside me too.”
Her parents found fault with Ada’s new friends, especially the boys. When the psychiatry teacher organised outdoor kendo classes and invited Ada to join the group, her parents would not let her go. “There’ll be boys there who’ll stare at you and try to grope you,” her mum explained.
“Mum saw drug addicts, alcoholics and prostitutes in all my friends and said they were a bad influence on me. When my parents met the psychiatry teacher, Mum said she could tell straight away that he was a closet sex maniac and might rape me one day. My parents even mentioned him later in their statements to the police: supposedly, he’d hypnotised me and was controlling me from a distance.”
Relations with her parents broke down completely when Ada told them she was an atheist.
“I was fourteen when I read the Bible. I was shocked by the cruelty and paradoxes, especially in the Old Testament, and troubled by all the inconsistencies. Then I read the Quran, and I studied Buddhism too. I came to the conclusion that God doesn’t exist, that we invented him ourselves to somehow motivate ourselves in difficult situations. But my parents haven’t read the Bible. Mum is simply convinced that things have happened to her throughout her life that can only be called miracles of God, and she took my confession very hard.”
When the psychiatry teacher started a science club at college, Ada signed up straight away. Despite the white-hot atmosphere at home, she felt happy there. She dreamed of finishing college and entering the psychiatry faculty at medical university.
“I wish you’d never been born”
On that hot summer day, Ada and a close male friend stayed late at the library. It was already evening when Ada switched on her phone and found around ten missed calls from her mum. With the despondency that had become familiar in recent years, she called back. Her mum shouted and demanded she come home immediately.
At home, her parents rounded on her, shouting and demanding she admit she had actually been “running around with a lover”. They demanded her phone password, threatening to beat her to death if Ada refused.
Frightened, Ada gave them the password and shut herself in her room. Finding nothing incriminating in their daughter’s messages with her friends, her parents ordered her to open the door.
At first her parents hit and kicked her. Then her dad used his belt. Her mum grabbed her daughter by the hair and began banging her head against the walls.
Having caught her breath a little, her mum made Ada get on her knees and ordered her to pray to God and beg forgiveness for her sins.
When her daughter asked which sins exactly she should be begging to have forgiven, her mother shouted that if she and her father had not stopped her downfall in time, sooner or later she would have become a prostitute. Or a drug addict. Or an alcoholic. Or all of them at once.
Ada obeyed. Then she touched her head and saw blood on her palm. Her mum began shouting: “You still haven’t had enough! I wish you were dead, I wish you’d never been born at all.”
Exhausted, her parents left their daughter to “think about her behaviour” and went to their room. Ada was hurting and frightened. She sat down and cried. She fell asleep like that.
For the next three days, blood seeped from her head at the slightest touch. Her head was splitting with pain — as though thousands of needles were being stuck into it at once. Traces of dried blood still remained on the door.
Ada was afraid to look at that door. She was also afraid to leave the room and be seen by her parents. She sat on the floor beside the bed and cried. Her brother, with whom Ada shared the room, said he was ashamed of her and moved into the living room for a few days.
“We’ve never been close, we don’t talk much — he rarely gets away from the computer. Mum worships him: she says that unlike me, he’s obedient and easy to get along with. And my parents… that day I began to wonder whether I loved them at all. Even before that, I’d thought I loved them less than you’re supposed to love your parents. But I respected them: for giving me a good education, for example. But perhaps even that respect was imposed on me.”
Ada was due to turn eighteen in two months.
Escape
The girl spent the next week and a half under house arrest. She was deprived of her means of communicating with the outside world — her phone and computer. A couple of days later, worried because Ada was not answering calls or messages, the close male friend she had been at the library with and a female friend came to see her.
Ada’s father had a “man-to-man talk” with the boy — with his fists. The female friend was called a “whore” and thrown out too.
“I felt awful. I kept thinking I didn’t want to live with this family, that I had nothing in common with them, that they didn’t understand me and never would, and it made me want to stop existing. I imagined taking lots of pills, falling asleep and never waking up again.”
A few days later, the girl was given her phone back on condition that she did not talk to her friends. At the first opportunity, however, Ada sent them a message, and her friends suggested a better alternative to suicide — running away from home.
They planned the escape for the day of her brother’s college entrance exam, which both parents went to with him. The escape plan nearly fell through, though, because of her father, who returned unexpectedly early and came across Ada’s friend in the courtyard, waiting for her by a taxi. Running upstairs, the furious man rounded on his daughter with questions: “What, are you talking to him again? Back to your old ways?”
“I said I didn’t know anything about it, and then he went out onto the balcony to make sure once again that my friend was there. I only had time to grab a little bag with my documents, run downstairs and get into the taxi. My father drove after us: he chased us for about ten minutes, but the taxi driver managed to lose him.”
Ada went straight to the police to file a complaint against her parents. The first thing they did at the police station was try to talk her out of it.
“They started saying that Dad and Mum loved me and only wanted the best for me, that I’d regret it later. And the beatings — of course they were wrong, but they’d have a serious talk with my parents and they wouldn’t do it again.”
The girl insisted they accept her complaint, having decided to live in a crisis centre for the time being. A female lawyer friend had told her about the centre and advised her to wait there until she came of age, then find a job and rent a flat. Her parents, whom the police had summoned to the station, declared that the crisis centre was “a dump for bums and a drug den” and urged Ada to come home: to talk and sort everything out.
But the girl did not want to go home — except to get her things. When they drove up to the house, though, neither Ada nor the police could persuade her parents to hand them over.
“Mum asked the police to leave us alone for a few minutes. As soon as we were alone, she began threatening to tell the police I’d stolen a thousand dollars from the house, and then they’d open a case against me. Seeing that this wouldn’t break me, my parents brought out a few changes of underwear and told me to leave.”
A Shaky Agreement
Ada spent about three weeks at the crisis centre. When her friend brought her a phone, the centre’s social worker informed her parents.
“She told my parents about everything I did. Maybe it’s part of her way of working, but I stopped trusting her. And the psychologist told me to ‘sort my head out’, and that it would be better if I made up with my parents.”
The centre’s psychologist explained to Ada that her parents really did love her, they just expressed their feelings in the wrong way, and that if the girl wanted, the psychologist could work with them too. But Ada was sceptical that people over fifty could change. And her parents flatly refused to engage with the specialist anyway.
Her mum and dad came to the crisis centre several times, and twice took Ada to the police to give statements.
“My parents just came and took me away. No one from the centre came with me, and I was afraid they wouldn’t bring me back. First they took me home and demanded I withdraw the complaint and admit to the police that I hadn’t been in my right mind, that I’d fallen and hurt myself.”
By then, however, the police already had a forensic medical report confirming that the beatings had happened. Despite this, the officer who had taken the complaint also began urging Ada to think a little longer and reminded her of the punishment for giving false testimony.
“And the local officer just said, ‘That explains it,’ when he found out whose granddaughter I was. Dad’s mother, who lives next door to us, is a notorious troublemaker. She’s fallen out with all the neighbours. The police have fined her for slander more than once. The local officer knew both her and my parents by sight. I felt ashamed, and upset as well that the police weren’t taking me seriously.”
For a long time the police could not understand what Ada wanted. She lived in a big detached house, her dad didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, wasn’t a drug addict. What more did she need?
Ada had to confirm in writing that she was not under anyone’s influence and did not belong to any sects.
During another visit to the centre, an agreement was reached with her parents: Ada would find work, socialise with whoever she wanted, live with her maternal grandmother and stay in constant contact with them. At the crisis centre, the papers were signed and the parents were allowed to take the girl away. A few days later, the social worker went to her grandmother’s house for a follow-up visit. Not finding Ada there, she left. No one from the centre contacted her again.
A few days later, her mum changed her mind and spoke to her grandmother. After that, the grandmother, who had initially taken her granddaughter’s side, began urging her to withdraw the complaint, “get that nonsense out of your head” and return to the family, because what had happened was, once again, an expression of parental care and love.
“I was in a stupor, my mind clouded over. I was utterly exhausted by all these conversations. When Mum forgot our agreement and insisted I go home with her, I no longer had the strength to resist. They took me back. At home the suicidal thoughts came back; I told myself I was worthless, that I couldn’t stand up for my rights and that my life would go on being just as bleak.”
Living by Her Own Rules
While Ada was still living with her grandmother, she met with the investigator. The investigator literally had to be forced to accept her complaint, the girl says. He did not answer calls, was always either in court or on holiday, and forgot to record important points in her testimony.
“The day after I was forcibly taken home, I called the investigator and told him I was scared. He said they couldn’t guarantee my safety and I’d be better off making up with my parents. Then he called my father and reported my call. My parents started shouting again, didn’t go to give their scheduled statements over the next two days, and the investigator didn’t summon them.”
Although her parents no longer laid a hand on her, they kept reminding her that she was a snitch.
Ada was afraid they would find a way to force her to withdraw the complaint, and decided to try running away again. Throwing her essentials into a backpack along with her medical coat, Ada went not to class at college but to the Public Defender’s Office, where she was provided with a lawyer.
The girl also shared her story anonymously on social media. Some users condemned the child who, having filled her head with “Istanbul conventions” and fallen under the influence of “European perversions”, was taking her own parents to court. Many, however, supported Ada’s view that violence against children — even your own — is a crime that must be punished, and supported Ada’s decision to live separately and by her own rules.
Strangers responded and gave her a temporary place to stay until Ada found a job, which she combined with her studies, and was able to rent a flat with some other young people. The people she had been staying with helped her with clothes, bed linen and toiletries. The girl tried to save on everything else: she even wrote her lecture notes out by hand to avoid spending money on photocopying. She was not afraid to live on her own. Sometimes she was frightened of having no money, but she knew she had friends who would always come to her aid.
Her parents called her several times, tried to bring her home, shouted that she had disgraced them, and then — left her alone.
“But I still felt uneasy at the thought that they might change their minds, might start bothering me again. I felt stronger and more secure than before, but some fear still remained.”
Her lawyer, public defender Armine Fanyan, helped the girl become stronger and more secure.
Help or Punish?
For the public defender, this is the first case in her ten years of practice in which a child has brought a suit against their parents. But that does not mean such cases are rare, the lawyer points out; it is just not customary here to “snitch” on family members. Nor do serious gaps in the procedural system encourage people to seek help from the law, from the protocol for conducting questioning to the absence of qualified psychological and legal support for the victim of violence.
If the case had gone to court, Ada’s parents would have received two months in prison, or they would have had to pay a fine of a hundred thousand drams. But punishment has never reformed anyone, public defender Armine is convinced, and all parties need help.
In handling cases, Armine sometimes has to take on the role of psychotherapist or family mediator.
“I always try to talk a lot to both sides of a conflict, understand the reason, try to find a solution before court. I talked a lot with Ada, and separately with her parents; I explained that the case might not go to court if they repented, asked forgiveness and signed a paper obliging them to rule out any kind of violence — psychological or physical — against my client.”
Armine says that at the beginning of their meetings, Ada’s parents, especially her father, were quite aggressive and unwilling to make any concessions. But after several conversations, Ada’s parents softened and agreed to negotiate.
“I had the impression that the spiritual bond between the family members had been broken. The parents belong to a different culture, a different time. There’s a very large generation gap, and misunderstanding that stems from it. Our parents like to impose excessive care and guardianship on their children, and one day that care turns into a rope and begins to strangle them.”
Most of the angry comments from people discussing Ada’s story were directed at her mum. We tend to idealise the role of the mother and endow every woman with an unconditional maternal instinct and love for her child even before it is born. A father caring for his child, meanwhile, moves us as though it were something out of the ordinary. That makes it much harder for us to understand or forgive a mother’s deviant behaviour.
According to Ada, the woman who raised her often witnessed her father beating her mother when she was a child. The child was hit too. Ada’s mum probably dreamed that when she grew up, she would marry a good man and become a loving mother to her children. That she would have a strong bond with her children. That there would be no violence.
Psychologist Arpi Khalatyan explains that in practice, children who have grown up in a family where there was violence often grow up with difficulties in socialisation, are prone to depression and neuroses, and when they start their own families, may repeat their parents’ established patterns of behaviour.
“A child identifies with the parent of the same sex. Breaking away from the ‘bad’ model and accepting a ‘good’ one takes a certain maturity and, often, qualified help. Many people have neither, and mechanically adopt the pattern they’ve known since childhood. Women like this, for example, may feel unconscious envy of their daughters and push them into repeating their own fate, and any sign of their daughter’s success may irritate them.”
Ada’s mum married a man who immediately forbade her to work, swore and periodically beat her in front of the children. She spends whole days cooking, cleaning, playing computer games and watching television. She rejects all Ada’s attempts to get her out of the house, to a café or the cinema, for example — “there’s no point wasting money”.
Ada says that her mum would cry after her husband shouted at her or hit her, and assure the children she would have divorced their father long ago, but was held back by the thought that they would be disgraced in front of their relatives and neighbours, and the children would grow up without a father.
“I told her many times: if you want a divorce, and it will make you happy, I’ll support you. But she never listened. She’s terribly dependent on what people think.”
Lawyer Armine Fanyan is convinced that in this situation, ways must be sought to create common ground between family members, and that with work, creating a new, positive atmosphere in the family is an entirely achievable goal.
“What’s needed here is work from several sides on deeply buried problems, to restore that broken bond. Highly specialised training for police officers and lawyers wouldn’t hurt either. The state should provide psychologists free of charge to work with both sides. The psychologist may not manage to normalise relations within the family; people may want nothing to do with each other, that’s an option too — but the work needs to begin in any case.”
The Right to a Happy Ending
Armine Fanyan managed to keep the case from going to court. Ada says she was very lucky with her defender, who did everything possible — even things outside her duties as a lawyer — to get the family members to agree to discuss the conflict and reach an agreement acceptable to both sides.
As it happened, while the lawyer was working on arranging the meeting, Ada’s grandmother suddenly died. The girl went to the memorial service.
“My parents seemed somehow broken, different. We talked for a long time, especially Mum and me. Mum asked for forgiveness: she said she’d been angry with me, that her mind had clouded over, that she shouldn’t have acted that way and should have listened to me, talked calmly.”
Her parents told Ada they were proud of her for not being afraid to fight for her rights, leave and live on her own. They agreed that she could work, offered to help her find a better job and to let her live at their house — if she wanted to.
Ada withdrew the case from the police and returned. She decided for herself that, for now, it was temporary. She says something very good has appeared in their relationship; they now talk a lot, especially she and her mum, and try to hear each other. But Ada does not want to rush, and for now she is afraid that the fragile sense of kinship that emerged under the shock of her grandmother’s death and the conversations with the lawyer may weaken and disappear.
She does not regret speaking out and going through all the difficulties. Ada is convinced that if she had stayed, relations with her family would have grown worse and worse, and who knows where they would have led.
“Sometimes, when people are too close to each other — physically or spiritually — they find it hard to see each other. You need distance. When we lived together, I was terribly afraid of my parents’ reactions, knew they wouldn’t hear me out and often preferred to keep quiet and lie rather than take part in yet another row.
When I left, a lot changed inside me, and inside them too. Back then they came to the crisis centre and told me I was a nobody and I’d be lost without them. They really believed it. And now they were very surprised that I could be independent and not fall in with ‘bad company’, as they’d predicted. Mum said she’d grown more and rethought more in those two months than in her entire life.”
There are setbacks too. But both sides are trying. And perhaps, in small steps, her parents will be able to revive the trust and love the child felt in her distant childhood: in that same cosy home with Charlie the French bulldog.
Perhaps it will turn out that they cannot coexist with each other after all. Ada is prepared for that scenario too. But she is no longer a little, confused girl, but a mature person who knows what she wants and how to achieve it. Ada still wants to live separately and earn her own living. For now, she goes to classes, feeds the neighbourhood dogs out of her student stipend, and is now torn over what to choose: becoming a psychiatrist, or a vet after all.
Some of the people’s names have been changed
