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Speaking to police in 2010 from her hospital bed, where she was recovering from serious wounds to her head, shoulders and hands, Ms. Ebrahimi described the difficulty of living in a household where her every step was monitored to make sure she was following her Afghan family’s code: no smoking, no drinking, no late nights and no boyfriends.

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For a long time, she went along, she said, to preserve her family’s honour. “I had a good reputation in my entire family, in the Afghan community, but I suspect that now I no longer do,” she told the detective. She recounted the fate of another family from the community whose daughter “ran off” with a man: “Nobody thinks well of that family,” she said. “Nobody wants to marry the daughters of that family.”

She said she feared her three younger sisters could suffer a similar fate because the community would blame her for having made a “mistake.” (She was stabbed after staying out on the town two nights in a row, leading her mother to fear she had become a prostitute.) “My sisters will also be judged because of me,” she said.

It was in her 19th year, she said, that she started to push back against her parents’ discipline, and by her own account she was a handful. “I wanted to go out. I wanted to rebel. I wanted … to do all that,” she told police “I wanted to smoke. I wanted to drink. I was fed up.”

I’m not even 20 years old. I’m dying, and it’s my mother who is going to kill me

The night of June 11, 2010, was the first time in her life she had gone downtown to a nightclub, she told police. She said she saw an outdoor concert and went to a bar where she met two girls who let her sleep over. Her parents, she would later learn, were frantic and lectured her when she returned. The following night, she snuck out and again stayed out until morning.