1058: Nina Aouilk | Ending Forced Marriage and Honor Killings Part Two

23:15So scared. Playing with my daughter. I'm playing with my daughter in the front room. I'm playing with my daughter in my bedroom because I don't know where to take her. There's no real relationship between me and her father, but we're living, cohabiting. Sure, okay. They say, you know what, move upstairs because it's a bit safer there. No one can come there unless they climb the stairs and you'll know they're coming. So I listened to them because I think they're helping me and they were to a degree, but they wanted more rent as well. So I moved upstairs into this bigger place. It's got three bedrooms.

23:41Now my daughter's six, seven months old. and she's walking around a little baby walker. And I keep going up and down the stairs to the newsagents and company. And a guy walks in and says, oh, easy money. And I'm thinking, what's easy money? I want to know because I want to give my daughter everything I never had. And it turns out he's selling mobile phones. He says to me, no. Almost calls me a little girl, tells me to go. And I run down to the end of the road where we have these large phone boxes, like little toy of the... The little red phone booth that everybody knows about. Yeah. and the doors are so heavy I'm prizing it open with my daughter's pushchair and I'm calling a number that we can get addresses from.

24:21There wasn't hardly anyone selling mobile phones at this time in 1993 and they give me the address. I write down this contract because there's no typewriters, no computers and I send it out to him. Then there's another company, I think it might be them too, send it to them too. And within, I think, two or three days he came back and he knocked on the door and he said, I've got your contract and he's laughing at me almost. But it's all, again, if you don't ask, you don't get. And I became a very successful mobile phone distributor to the point where I didn't even need him. The people that were providers, the airtime providers came direct to me and said, we want you to have your own shop.

24:55Find a place and we'll help you for the first year. And I did. And my entrepreneurial journey just was on a different tangent. You know, I was doing so well. Maybe because I'd learned this from my father. I don't know. Maybe I'd seen things. I don't know. It's in your blood. It's in my blood. And I can't deny him of that. Well, he didn't. I wanted to give my daughter everything that I didn't have myself. My mum had taught me how not to be a mum. So I gave her that over love, you know, anything I would give to her. And then my partner's interested because I'm making a lot of money now. So he doesn't want to leave.

25:25He's not leaving. But he's doing his own thing, going out all the time, not really inclusive of me. And that's normal again. My father did that. So why would I question it? I didn't have a normal relationship with anyone up to this point. I've never dated. I don't know what dating is. and we have another little boy. We've moved into our own house. We've got a beautiful house, white picket fence. It's exactly the way I used to draw it, literally. Things are okay between us, but he's angry a lot. But I'm used to anger, remember? My mum was always angry. I don't know why he's angry, but he is. And he starts to demand money.

25:58So to be in my life, I needed to give him anything between 5 ,000, 8 ,000 pounds a month. He doesn't work. He has nothing to do with the children. Never turns up to a parents' evening, nativity place sports day he's not there everyone thinks i'm a single mother but everyone thinks the business belongs to him that we're running oh i see because it's that thing you know that whole how people see him he's driving nice cars because i'm providing i don't even see that it's me providing i still think it's a nice thing because i don't believe in myself so much and then i'm pregnant for the third time and he said to me i don't want anything to do with you after this because i don't even want children with you you just keep having them and i'm like well I'm one of three.

26:39I want to be one of three. And they've got this weird mentality thing. And I get pregnant and the pushing had started, you know, the pushing my head into the door as we're driving, the pushing me down the stairs, the pushing me against the kitchen door. He'd set my pillow on fire as I was pregnant. What? And yeah. While you're sleeping, I assume. While I'm sleeping. My daughter's in the bath and she's asking me questions. And I don't even know how I put the fire out. I'm not even sure, you know, going back. I think that would be, that's terrifying to wake up to something like that. I remember my hair being on fire.

27:10Of course. It's a real distinctive smell of flesh burning and hair burning. And going back to the bride burning thing, I've got this fear of fire. And I'm thinking he's going to set me on fire and I'm going to just burn like those girls did. So I'm over pleasing now. What can I do? What do you need? How can I help you? But I'm pregnant. And third pregnancy is not easy because you're tired. You're doing more than you did for the first one. You've got two other kids to look after. Plus, I'm running several businesses by this point. I'm a millionaire. I'm a self-made millionaire, but I don't have the luxury of even being a millionaire because in the kitchen, we have a shelf for him and we have a shelf for me and the children.

27:46My money was controlled so that I couldn't buy the children the same food as him. And I wouldn't eat properly because it meant the children would have enough food. So I would let them eat, not myself. In the pantry, as we call it, the understairs cupboard, there was biscuits and he would always want the Mokvitis chocolate biscuits. and sometimes my youngest son, he would go and eat them. This is going forward now. And I would scold him and say, don't do that, you'll get me in trouble. And no doubt I used to get pulled into the kitchen and beaten because of that. It was that minor, you know, those little things.

28:17But in the third pregnancy, I'm really tired. It's quite soon after my son was born. I'm coming down the stairs and he's saying to me, I need the money, I need the money. I'm going to Italy. He was constantly travelling and living this lavish, almost playboy lifestyle I see now. But at the time, I thought he was traveling for work, looking for more ideas that never came to fruition. And he pushes me and I fall flat on my stomach and he leaves. My daughter was at a sleepover and I can almost feel a foot coming out of me. A foot? Like a baby foot? A baby's foot. And I ring the people that we used to live with, you know, the landlady and said, I need help.

28:55help she comes and takes my son and i'm cut long story short in the hospital giving birth to my third child and you know the labor's like a normal labor he's breech so they're saying he's breech so we need to just put a bit more caution and care this is a baby position for people who've never heard of breech baby it's has to do with the position of the baby in the uterus so his feet are coming first as opposed to the head. They're monitoring the heartbeat, everything's fine. And I give birth to Tyler, his name was, and he's the most beautiful little baby. I'm holding him and, you know, they're putting the little plastic thing on his foot as they do, you know, with the name of the baby in the time of birth and he stops breathing.

29:40And I'm lying there holding him and I want to shake him, but you know what, you're told not to shake a baby. And I can hear all the other babies in the ward crying because they've just been born. And I'm saying to him, Ty, breathe. I'm saying to God, you've taken the wrong person. It should be me, not him. But there was that level of not wanting to accept that I'd lost my baby boy. And I kind of at that point just stopped living, stopped existing. I kind of switched off. It was dark 24-7. There was no light. I remember leaving the hospital feeling really empty. I remember my pillow never being dry my arms were longing to hold to him I had my daughter I had my son but I couldn't I couldn't find the comfort in them I used to have large patio doors and I used to sit on the floor looking out saying at that point to God because I believed give me back what you've taken you know you should have never have done this why did you do this and at night I would hear a baby crying.

30:46I would hear the baby crying. It wasn't my other son. It wasn't my daughter. I would hear him crying. Sorry. I didn't go to work. I didn't feed the kids, which sounds terrible, but I mentally had got to a point where I just wanted out of this painful life and it was the hardest thing I've ever been through. But I did manage to persuade my partner to give me another baby, you know, because he didn't that time he wasn't even sleeping with me. He was sleeping somewhere else and he just didn't want anything to do with me. He said I was disgusting. No man would want me that I was, you know, really ugly.

31:30And I was lucky to even have him come near me. Just classic abuser nonsense. You believe what you're told when you're in that state of mind, especially being depressed. Yes, you do. And I did get pregnant. And I remember going to hospital thinking it's a girl. So I've had three boys now, two boys, sorry, it won't be a third boy. And saying to them, I want a pink room. And I was really insisting on having a pink room. I wasn't even aware I was in labour. I went to hospital not feeling well. And they said, you're in labour. The baby's coming today. I said, it's not due for a while. It's coming today.

32:01It was a really pretty pink room. And I wouldn't sit down. I wanted this baby standing. Don't ask me why. okay so um i was really adamant about standing up not laying down i said it's for your reasons i don't want to lie down for your reasons i want to stand up for my reasons gravity it was probably the easiest birth and he was the biggest baby and he you know i held on to him for dear life making sure he was still breathing and i didn't sleep all night just watching him just watching his every little move and he looked just like tyler i have to admit i wanted to keep the tea So I named him something with tea and he kind of gave me a reason to live again, I guess.

32:37And he's my youngest. As your children got older, did they start to realize what was going on at home? Yeah, my daughter went to university. She, when you break out of a cycle, you look back and you think this isn't normal. She looked back and she could tell things weren't okay. Yeah. So she questioned her dad and said, why did you talk to her like that? Why did you do this? And the abuse was getting so much so that he stopped us talking. He said, you can't speak to each other. I would put my phone here on a table every day and he would check through it to see if I'd spoken to her or not and it became a norm that we would keep our phones here he would track my car to work he would have a CCTV put everywhere I went so that he could remotely access it if I went to a supermarket I'd show him the receipt and the time stamp so he knew when I was there and how long I was there for so the control became unbearable and he knew that he was losing control because my daughter had gone to university.

33:29And my middle son, he's five years younger than my daughter. He had done his GCSEs, which I don't know what you call him. It's like your middle school before you go to, just before university. So he was studying for them and his father hit him for no reason. He came down the stairs and just punched him in the back of his head with a real third. And I stood up and said, don't do that. Why are you hitting my children? Instead of saying, right, I'm going, I thought I'll send him away because that's the right thing to do. because your reality is so distorted. You can't see straight. You don't understand what's happening right in front of you because you're almost blinded by what's going on.

34:03It's almost like a cloud above you that doesn't shift and you're not doing anything to make it shift. You're not stepping away. You're standing under that cloud deliberately. But I just didn't see it and I regret not seeing it. So I sent him to boarding school, but that meant that's a lot of money I've got to pay in a British boarding school. And I thought, you know what, it's really good. He carries on playing his soccer, which he was playing at high level. It's really good. I'll send the youngest one to, he'll go next year or the year after, but I just need to save up. It meant I had to work harder.

34:31So I'm opening up a new business, which was my solution to everything. Oh, Jordan, you want that? I'll go open a new business and I'll create the money for it. My youngest son became ill because suddenly his buffer had gone. That person he ran to every time I was being dragged into the kitchen and being beaten, he disappeared. It was just the two of us left. And there was a lot of noise, physical and mental noise for two people. And it became unbearable for him. So stress has to go somewhere. And if it stays in your body, it makes you sick. It made him sick. He ended up with an autoimmune disease.

35:05Again, there was this thing, don't talk about anything out of the house. If you do, you know, I'll find out and I'll kill you. I'll do this. You can't leave. I will kill you. You can't make it on your own. So we were drowning, literally, both of us. And I was in the hospital. He had a very big operation. It was a very touch and go situation. And I asked him to come his father I said please come because he's got this he'd planned a trip to China during all of this your son's ill in hospital you're not going to go anywhere you're going to be there 24 7 he wasn't he didn't come once to visit him my daughter turned up from university and said I'm here for you and it was reassuring because I didn't know what was going to happen on the other side of him going through those doors when he had his operation I don't know if he was going to come back or not and you know anybody with a sick child my heart goes out to them too because it's a horrible place to be.

35:51But we did come back home eventually after feeling like we'd been in hospital forever. And I was working from hospital. I was taking calls while staying with him. I would not move. You know, I slept there. I didn't go anywhere. The day we got back, it was a couple of days later, my daughter gets a picture message on her phone saying, I'm sorry from her father. And every time I had seen my daughter, she'd said, it feels like this is a goodbye because I feel like he'll kill you and I'll never see you again. So for her, she was in constant anxiety. And she had just got into this new degree she wanted to do.

36:23She's a biomedical scientist. She wanted to study dentistry. They turned her down over and over and over again. She finally gets into King's College, which is the best university for dentistry. And this happens, you know, she gets this picture message. So it knocked her for six. And what's the picture message? The picture message. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. It's myself asleep on a sofa. I didn't sleep because of the setting on pillow. I had insomnia, but also her father, my partner, would lock our doors at 11 o 'clock at night and reopen them at six. It was like a control thing. Yeah, like a prison warden.

36:55I didn't sleep ever. I was really bad at sleeping. I'd go for days without sleeping. But my son's picture that she'd received was him slumped on a table in a really awkward way. and she just knew her heart that instinct was telling her something's wrong this shouldn't be this way so she panicked and she didn't know what to do to the point where she called me and people say why didn't she call the police but when you're in a panic you do what comes first she called me and I didn't answer she called and called and called until I did answer but when I did my throat was really dry and I said let me just get some water and I've got the phone in one hand I've gone to turn the tap on i turned to look this way and on the stove he's turned all the all the taps on on the stove so there's gas completely so the house is full of gas and people say we can't die of that but you can you can die of carbon if i'd woke up later on and switched the light on the house would have exploded it was literally an accident waiting to happen which led us to being removed because of the situation so we were removed in 2015 both my youngest son and myself because of domestic violence.

38:03So the state intervened in this? He told the school, my son. Oh, good for him. Yeah, there's a lot of courage it takes for you to ask for help. Yeah. Especially being a man. It was hard for me to ask for help. I never asked. He did it for me. But we were placed in a very disgusting safe home, as they call it, where we stepped in the door, the carpet squelched because it was full of urine. Ooh. And the wall was full of human feces. And it was inhabitable, really. Yeah. But because I was a millionaire on paper, it led us to only be allowed to stay there for a certain time. And that led to homelessness seven years ago.

38:35Wow. Wow. Okay. So you didn't have access to the money, but they said, oh, you have means. You'll be fine. We're just going to shove you out the door. Money is often in bricks and mortar. Money is often in machinery. Money is often in assets, business assets. So did I have accessible money? No. They told me when I left not to take a thing. It's that whole panic thing. You know, you've got 20 minutes to leave. what do you take if i take you into a supermarket i say georgian you've got five minutes to grab what you can for the first three minutes you're going to panic think yeah i'm getting a cart full of potatoes yeah you don't know what to take so we took literally the coat on my back which is again prominent for me because it provided a shelter a month so you leave does he try to follow you because abusers often don't let things go yeah i mean i he's still looking for me my really mother and father found that i had left and they still decided they would look for me as well because now I was out there again.

39:28They won't find you here in Canada where we're recording this. That's an awful feeling. That's a really terrible feeling. Well, I spent a lot of my time looking over my shoulder, walking on eggshells, but now I don't. I found this new freedom, I call it. Yeah. And it's on the other side of love and I encourage others that when you become less fearful, when you look on the other side of fear, you'll find this immense amount of love and freedom that comes with it. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do whatever's smart and considerate. listeners do, which is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors.

39:59All the deals and discount codes and ways to support this show are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And if you can't remember the name of the sponsor, you're wondering if we have a certain sponsor, you go ahead and email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Nina Wolk. what about contact with your family have they ever has your brother ever maybe called you and said hey we were pretty terrible to you or hey where are you or how are you or anything like that i mean during my relationship with my ex-partner my brother did find me after 15 years um i was with my partner for 23 years so after 15 years he found me to apologize because he'd been caught by the police attacking his girlfriend at the time with a hammer.

40:49And the police in the United Kingdom have come up with this new thing that if you go through a series of meetings and counselling sessions, you don't have to have charges pressed against you. I see. You can correct yourself and, you know, do some community service or something. So he had to come and find me because he told them quite openly what he'd done, which, you know, is giving evidence in a way. Right. But they got me to sign a paper, which I did. not really wanting to, but I felt pressured to. He said, do you forgive me? I said, I do forgive you. I'll never forget. I didn't want anything to do with him really, but I tried for a few months with my children.

41:25But I realized in those 15 years how different I had become, how I was no longer so in that South Asian mentality. I didn't do things like them. I felt like an outsider, which I knew I was, but for the right reasons. I had more compassion, more love. They were very angry at their children or very dismissive. My brother, coincidentally, not long after had an arranged marriage that he chose. He chose the bride and he had a girl and he didn't celebrate the girl. And that was kind of like the breaking point where I thought, well, he's just come out of the hospital angry, just stormed off. And I didn't have too much interaction, but I had enough to know what was going on.

41:59I thought, I don't want this. I don't want my children subjected to this either. And what is family? You know, I was pining for this family. I was feeling I don't belong, but I belong to me. You know, home isn't there. Home is where you make it. And I had a realization that I didn't need them anymore. That's quite horrible. I feel almost compelled to say, I would imagine most Indians, most Sikh people are not like this. Well, a lot of people say, well, you know what, I get a lot of comments on, I've done over a hundred podcasts and interviews. This is probably going to be my last. If I do another one, it will be.

42:30Oh, that's nice to hear, I think. Or is it bad because we're number 100 and you're sick of it? No, no. It's the last straw, Jordan. No, no. It's just I go back and forth in my life. So I go back to that six-year-old. I go back to that 14-year-old girl that was raped. I go back to the 21-year-old that barely has been dead. This can't be pleasant. And it's like taking bits of myself and leaving them there. And at 50, I became whole. I found who I was. I had this almost awakening of who I really was and what life meant. So if I keep going back and forth, which I've been doing for over nearly a year and a half now, I leave fragments of myself and I want to be that whole person so I can be better for my future and the people that I'm helping.

43:11So I'm in a great place so people that are listening to this mustn't think I'm really sad or depressed because I'm not. You know, finding myself has been the best thing. But I tell my story and I describe it as cutting myself open so that other people can heal because people do come forward. It's crazy to me that this is happening not just in rural India where I'm sure it still happens. It does happen, yeah. Canada, the UK, the United States. If it's happening in the UK in the 80s and 90s, it's for sure happening in the United States. Yeah, as I was saying earlier, I've had 15 ,000 messages more or less, if not more.

43:44And a lot of them are from people from my culture of ages between 10 and 17, 18. And they are young girls who are describing my life, my old life. So I know there's other Ninas out there. I know there are millions of Ninas that are living that life that I escaped. So I don't really want to not do things about it. I feel it's a calling. It's my purpose to do something about it. So it's still happening, but it's hidden. You know, the messages may not be as clear as they were for me. Sexual abuse is very common. It's normally an uncle or someone in the family and it happens, but no one talks about it because it's such a stigma.

44:22And we're taught so much so by our culture that we shouldn't speak out in the communities that there's a shame factor. Sure. Which fully enables the abuse. I'm telling everyone the shame isn't on you. It's on the person that's done this. Their hands are dirty, not yours. Speak out in your truth. There is a sense of healing in speaking out. You know, I tell people this as well, that it's hard. It's really difficult revisiting those places. But when you do, you learn to let go. You learn to allow that time to pass and to become present where you are now. It's very brave of you. I mean, I always go back and forth with these types of interviews where I'm because I know I'm asking you to relive the most horrific moments of your life in like ideally 90 minutes.

45:01Right. Can we cram in the worst thing? And it's difficult to ask somebody to do that. It's very brave of you to do that. I don't blame you for not wanting to do it 100 more times. Yeah, mentally it takes a toll. And every time I say I'm not going to do it, hundreds of more women will come in and men as well. It's not just women. You know, people resonate with someone else's pain and pain is pain, whichever form it comes in. So I want everyone to know that they're not alone because I felt alone very much in my life. You can be a mother, you can be a daughter, you can be your girlfriend or a wife.

45:30But when you're on your own, if you don't know who you are, that's a real sense of being alone. I found me three years ago. I'm 53. I found myself at 50. And I really love who I am. And I loved all the bits that nobody else did. I love the fact that I had to go through this journey because with my clients, I teach them that it's okay having a goal and celebrating that goal, but it's the journey that makes you, if you learn to celebrate the goods and the bads on your journey, then life is really beautiful. What about your extended family? Do they all kind of just like, oh, I mean, we don't talk with them or something weird's going on there.

46:04or were they, it just seems bizarre that everyone's sort of in on this. It's like a weird conspiracy. I've had a lot of threats from family members still. Don't speak at why you're doing this, what difference it's going to make now. Your poor father. I haven't mentioned something that's really important, which is in 2015, I had the police contact me and say to me they needed a character reference from my father. I wasn't really in the right frame of mind. Hey, I was homeless, right? I couldn't think straight. I had my son's hand in mind and I had nothing else to say that I had in my life, really.

46:35Character reference. So I found it difficult to even converse with the police. But the character reference was for a charge that was made against my father because he'd abducted my sister. And I said, I don't have a sister. They said, you have a six-year-old half-sister. Your father, sorry, your father took your half-sister. He took her to India and she's missing. I couldn't get it. I couldn't understand it. I couldn't absorb it. but when I got to a point where I found me I revisited that horrible place and horrible thing because we bury things because we can't deal with it and I realized that I have a half sister called Julia I've not long found that out her name she's half Polish my father had had an affair and he hid this affair and he hid the fact he had a daughter a whole daughter and a whole person and he's hiding.

47:28So to hide her from the community and being found out, he abducted her, he took her without the mother's knowledge, and he sold her to human traffickers in India. Oh my God. Where they harvest organs. And when I had the acknowledgement this has happened and I actually understood, I realized I couldn't stay quiet. And that's when I decided to speak out. I felt guilty. I don't feel guilty now, but I did. I felt guilty because I hadn't held him accountable. You know, for him, he was above the law. He was getting away with things. I didn't press charges. But I understood it as well. I wasn't able to at that point.

48:05But now being this person that says she's found herself, who's escaped the control of another person who's now free, what could I do with my time? How could I make it matter? In her honour, what could I do? So I started speaking out. I work with other non-profits. There's one in Switzerland, in Geneva called Youth Underground. She taught me a lot. You know, Rasha giving her a shout out because she deserves it. She does a lot of work with the youth, teaching them about grooming. She's coming to America soon as well, working here. And she taught me a lot of things. I worked with another non-profit.

48:38I can't say where they are because they're more underground, but they actually rescue children and I begged them to help me. They told me she'd been left somewhere where they harvest organs. Listen, maybe because of the interest from the police, they won't do that to her. They'll keep her as a servant and sell her to the Middle East where the Middle East thing comes into play as well because they have a lot of housemaids and servants. But the point is she's still missing. He went to prison for four years. She's still missing. She's still missing. Sorry, your father went to prison for four years?

49:09He went to prison for four years. Thank goodness. But because of cultural influences, because of the honor in which he took her, because of the sake of honor, an attempted honor killing, it was reduced. So he was out of prison and he's living his life. But she's nowhere to be seen. This is really horrifying. How many honor killings are happening in the UK? Do we have stats on this? I mean, of course, I'm imagining it's like 90 % unreported. I'm not a statistical person. I know you have heard your podcasts. I know your facts and figures, but I'm not a fact. But I'm definitely a figure of influence when it comes to honor-based killings.

49:49I've lived it. I have the lived experiences. I have the pain. I have the scars. You know, I have the tears. I was not reported. None of my abuse was reported in life. And so many people go under the radar because we're too scared. So many people are taken out of the country and killed. But yeah, there's, I think, 12 girls every month get killed is the statistical. But that's nothing. I know that's nothing. I know it's not true. I've stood next to a girl whose sister was killed in Parliament in the police area. We've stood together and spoken because her sister had gone to the police station and said they're going to kill me and the police have gone.

50:24Yeah, OK. And the video footage is now there on a documentary that people can see. But the point is she was ignored. So now I sit on two boards at Scotland Yard, advisory boards. I'm in the home office. I work with the forced marriage unit. I'm on their board. But there's no point being on these boards and doing nothing. So I'm that voice that actually speaks up. I'm not a yes person. and I'm not a destructive or deliberate, you don't want to cause a problem, but I want the truth. I want them to do something. And I believe that, you know, if all of us stand up, we can create a little bit of change.

50:58I'm determined to create some change, ripples of change that maybe the future generations will benefit. But the key are men. The key is you, a man bringing forward compassion to give almost that standing that this is how a father should be, how a brother should be. You know, that's the key. So I'm working really hard to create awareness. And, you know, by going around talking the way I've been doing in the US on child marriages, I spoke in Dallas about that. There's a huge problem with child marriages in America. It's our 44 states. It's so crazy to hear that. But it's true. And, you know, having had the experiences I've had, I know that I'm not doing this now just for my sister.

51:35I'm doing it for all of those girls, but also the boys that have had no one. Those people that feel alone, they're the ones I'm doing it for, the ones that felt they had nobody there for them. Nina, thank you so much. Endhonorkillings.org. We'll link it in the show notes. This is really incredible. It's just an unbelievable story. Amazing story, I should say, and shocking story. And it's very, again, very brave of you to tell it, to speak out, to help others. I just think it's really something we all need to know about. This is happening right under our noses, which I think is the most disgusting part of the whole thing, is it's way more common than we think and it's happening right here whether we know it or not.

52:11I mean I'd like to say before we go is what people can do. People always say well what can I do? I can't do anything. I don't want them to listen to this and just feel bad for me or bad for my story or bad for the girls. I want them to honor what I've been through. I want them to honor me by asking a question to anyone that they come across that they feel something's not right. Listen to your intuition and do something. Say something. You know ask the question even if it's are you okay. If you see a domestic violence, altercation happening on, I don't know, a train or a shopping centre. Destroy that situation by asking a simple question.

52:44When I say destroy, you can completely shut that down by saying, have you got the time, interrupting them or saying, do you know which bus goes to or do you know which train I need to catch or you guys won't know where this address is. It completely destroys that situation. It stops the argument completely. But just by following your intuition, if you know somebody's in the house next to you that doesn't come out. The daughters are treated badly. You can hear the screaming. Make a discreet call. You don't have to be in the face of this person. You can make a discreet call and be anonymous and just say, you know what, I'm suspicious that the children are not being treated well, because too many of us turn a blind eye.

53:18And that's why this continues. I think also, and this was mentioned elsewhere, possibly by you, if you're being taken somewhere against your will, or you know someone where that's happening, your advice was to stick metal objects and places. If you know that you're going to be sent to India the way I was, I wish somebody had told me this. It would have maybe helped me in that time if I was being forced. But place something metallic into your underwear or your pockets that your parents don't know about. It'll set off the radar and then you can ask for help. You must ask for help. It's so hard. But the people that are working in these places know these things happen.

53:51I'm trying to get in to train them myself. But, you know, ask for help and it will stop you being killed. You deserve to live. They deserve it. Anyone listening, they deserve it. You are good enough. Nina, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Jordan. You're about to hear a preview of one of my favorite stories on the Jordan Harbinger show with Megan Phelps Roper. She used to belong to one of the most hateful religious cults in America, the Westboro Baptist Church. She was born into this church and later escaped. To hear her tell the story firsthand is really incredible. I started protesting when I was five years old, But even at that first picket, there was a sign that said, gays are worthy of death.

54:28So God hates fags is what Westbrook's message that we became known for. We were the good guys and everyone outside the church was evil and going to hell. And we had the only message that would bring the world any hope. We had to go and warn people, these terrible things are happening. And if you want this pain to stop, then you have to change because God isn't going to change. after the September 11 attacks. We had the sign that said, thank God for September 11. What were we thinking? This massive crowd comes down. We were at this corner of this intersection of these three streets. By the time they actually reached us, we're just enraged.

55:07There was no space between us and them. It got really dicey. One of my cousins gave his signs to somebody else and started standing on top of a trash can pretending like he wasn't with us. They were, again, incredibly intense because obviously the circumstances are so sobering. It brings me incredible sadness to think about now. I can't do this forever. My family, they would refuse to have any contact with me at all once I left. Somebody that we had confided in sent a letter to my parents and told them that we were planning to leave. And then that email came in and we left. For more with Megan, including the details of her harrowing experience, check out episode 302 of the Jordan Harbinger show.

55:51I'm never sure how to wrap up these kinds of really just intense conversations. I think all of us are going to be thinking about this one for quite some time. Her nonprofit EndHonorkillings.org will be linked in the show notes. Honor is spelled the British way with a U after that last O. All Things Nina will be in the show notes at JordanHarbinger.com or just ask the AI chatbot on the website. Transcripts are in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter.

56:21Every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show. We dissect the lessons from it. So if you are a fan of the show, and I hope you are, and you want a recap of important highlights and takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do just that. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking as well over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at jordanharbinger on all the socials. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

56:51Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends if you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is really to share the show with those you care about. And if you know somebody who would be interested in this type of conversation, I realize it's a heavy one, but I find for some people these land quite right, and I would love it if you would share this one with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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