According to British media reports on October 15th, Amelia woke up in the dark, and her ex-husband stood by the bedside, staring down at her. The same man who threatened to kill her. The same man who threatened to kill her child. It was the same man who had put a butcher's knife to her throat when she was pregnant with the child.
He broke into her house again. Jawad was an Afghan immigrant known to police and Amelia claimed he used her to gain asylum in the UK. He made friends with her first and persuaded her to marry him. After their child was born, he used the baby to support his asylum claim after multiple previous denials, and then divorced her.
Even so, the threat continued.He raped her after the divorce and I thought he might have killed me while I was asleep," said Amelia, whose hands were shaking at the moment when she resumed.
“It seemed clear to me later that our relationship, our marriage, and his desire to have children with me were all part of his choice to stay in England.”
Amelia is a British and she is one of the thousands of people in the UK who married Afghan immigrants. According to official immigration statistics, as many as 6,000 such marriages have occurred since 2019. Most are considered legitimate and happy. But for Amelia, this is the beginning of years of pain.
A documentary recently found that immigrants living in asylum-seeking hotels are having children, hoping it will make it easier for them to stay in the UK.
While asylum seekers can still be deported after giving birth to a British-born child, additional safeguards make forced repatriation more difficult.
Amelia believes that her ex-husband's intention from the outset was to have a child, used to strengthen his asylum application and avoid being expelled from Britain.
She married Javad in 2017 and their child was born the following year.
“All this was done so cunningly that I didn’t realize it at the time. But now the damage has been done. I lost everything and can’t live a normal life anymore,” she said, “My daughter never had a normal, happy childhood. Our lives were completely destroyed, and for him, it was just an accompanying damage.”
Despite Amelia's repeated letters to the Interior Ministry saying Jawad had nothing to fear in Afghanistan, and despite her warnings that "this man will eventually kill me and my children," officials approved his asylum application.
Since then, he has traveled to Afghanistan twice, using his Afghan passport to enter the country through the Iranian border, and then using his British passport to return to Britain via Iran. This prevented the Ministry of the Interior from knowing that he had been to Afghanistan.
Amelia the matter to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and attached a link to his social media posts in Afghanistan when he was having a wedding with a new wife.
He is currently in Iran. But Amelia knew he'd probably come back.
An Home Office spokesman said: "While we do not comment on individual cases, we take any abuse of the immigration system extremely seriously. Where there is evidence of misconduct, we will take resolute action to crack down on it to protect the integrity of our borders."
In the case of Amelia, their relationship opened up a process of exploitation that destroyed her whole life. She met Javad through common friends in a quiet town in Kentshire. He just arrived in England and didn’t speak English, and every time she saw him, he was wearing the same Afghan clothes and I just felt he was poor,” she recalled, “I wanted to help him.”
She lived in a four-bedroom house and began to help Javad take English lessons, buy him clothes, assist in his asylum application, and pay his lawyer fees.
“In the beginning, he was very kind to me,” she recalls, “he would ride a bicycle in the rain and bring flowers to my doorstep.”
But soon after, just as she was carrying his child, he stopped her throat with a knife.The shift was gradual and dangerous.First was control.He asked for her phone, email, Facebook—the password for everything.
He forbade her to speak to any male except a family member. He would keep calling her at work, cycling around her sister's house to verify her location, and surprise her at her workplace.
"I can't go anywhere unless I'm with him by phone or video," said Amelia on Twitter one day, and he let me scan the room with a video to prove I wasn't with anyone."
'What did I do to make him this way?'
She mentioned the name of one of his friends in a random conversation. One of his ear lights opened his hand was so heavy that her eyebrows turned black and her ears sounded for an hour. She thought her ear membranes were broken. It was winter, and she wore sunglasses to hide her bruising wounds.
"I really thought he was the same person in the beginning, and as he became more abusive, I kept asking myself, what did I do to make him this way?" She said, tears running down her cheeks.
The mother, who has witnessed her daughter's suffering for many years, said: "Abuse is a process that empowers the victim while empowering the abuser. By the time the first punch came, the stage was already set. She's not asking what he did wrong-she's asking what he did wrong."
When the social service agency asked Amelia’s children to draw something that scared them, they handed out two rough sketches; one was a spider and the other was a lighthouse man standing outside the small house.
Amelia said Jawad was stalking the family, a child's portrayal of the harassment.
In public, Javad bin Laden is polite, kind and helpful, and people who know him describe him as the “most polite man they’ve ever met.”
Behind closed doors, he would insult Amelia every day, he would call at work, and be sweet and considerate when his boss was present. A few hours later, he would call her a "piece of shit" for no reason.
"He saw a girl crying on the street and would do anything for her," Amelia said. "But when we got married, I cried and slept next to him, but he would turn his back to me."
During their relationship, Javad worked illegally—first in a meat shop, then in an Indian restaurant, “under the table” to make money.
Over the past few years, he has worked illegally at a well-known convenience chain and sent money home. He never paid for bills, food or even his own clothes. Instead, he sent the income to Afghanistan, where his family built a big house with that money.
“Everything he wore when we were divorced was bought by me,” said Amelia, adding to his socks, underwear, belt and everything.
'He really killed my child'
When Amelia was about a month pregnant with their first child, Jawad started arguing outside her mother's home. When she saw that his face had changed-his teeth were crunching, and she had learned to recognize it as a precursor of violence-she ran to her car.
He threw her to the ground and beat her up. He dragged her into the driver's seat and continued to beat and bite her, hitting every part of her body that his hands could reach. The next morning, she started bleeding. She had a miscarriage.
"He literally killed my baby," she said, tears flowing down again.
She didn't call the police because she was "too afraid of him and his revenge."H, there were pictures of bites, wounds on her knee when he fell, and wounds on her back.
（原标题：I married an Afghan migrant. He raped me and used me to claim asylum）