on the run from her father

In 2013 Tahmineh Yusefie, then 30, was attacked by her father and brother in her father’s house in Qazvin, Iran. Her brother held down her arm and brushed her long hair out of her face. Then he prompted his father: “pour!”. Her father poured acid onto her face, arms and legs. The mother watched and did not intervene. The reason for this acid attack: Tahmineh wanted to leave her fiancé because she had found out he was a drug addict. In large parts of the Irani society women are repressed. Unemployment, misery, lack of a proper education system, no free media and above all religious tyranny all contribute to a social environment in which violence against women passes as justified. In such parts of the society women are considered property without rights and their demands are being denied. That was the beginning of her ongoing ordeal. Tahmineh and her sister fled from Iran to Germany in 2014 to save their lives. Now, in Germany, as a refugee, she constantly has to fight: not only for health insurance to pay for the countless plastic surgeries she needs, considered to be not vital and thus not refundable; but against all the consequences of this traumatic event: her pain, her inability to trust and connect, her isolation and her feeling that her mutilated body makes her an outcast everybody stares at. The trauma runs deep, she has extreme mood swings, but she keeps trying to overcome it and find inner peace.