Ayesha's story.

My name is Ayesha.

I'm 14 years old and I've always lived at home with my mum, Julie, my dad, Kasim, and my baby brother Amir.

My dad is Pakistani and mum is Geordie, but we're all Muslim and go to the mosque every week.

The most important thing you need to know about me is how much I love art.

I'm desperate to be an artist when I grow up, to have my paintings put up in art galleries and have my own studio.

When things feel like they're building up inside my head, drawing and painting takes all of my worries and lays them down onto a page.

When I'm concentrating really hard on my art, I can't think about anything else.

Most of the time, adults only pay attention to you when they're telling you off or wanting you to do something for them.

But when my art teacher, Mrs. Kahn, looks at my sketchbook and makes good comments, I feel so happy that I could float away on a cloud.

Recently, I've had a lot of worries to get down on those big pieces of paper Mrs. Kahn keeps in the art classroom.

I've been worrying about my mum about how much dad shouts at her.

I worry about the bruises on her wrists where he's gripped her while he shouts.

She tries to hide them under sleeves and long shawls by always spot the fresh ones.

In my culture, the father is always the head of the house.

In many ways, it's good because dad is always there to protect Mum, Amir, and me, but a lot of the time he's far too strict.

My grades have to be good all the time, and I'm not allowed to go to any afterschool clubs.

I'm not even allowed to meet with other girls from the mosque.

Dad says they listen to the wrong music and wear too much makeup and boys, they are totally out of the question.

The only boy I'm allowed to talk to is Amir, and he's not even two years old yet.

I don't have a mobile phone or a tablet, so I can't join in with the group chats that other people in my year have.

At first, I just thought all of this was normal.

That dads always expect their daughters to be perfect in every way, but as time went on, I realised that this was something more serious.

It wasn't about our culture or our religion, this wasn't normal for any family, including mine.

When school was shut down and we all had to learn from home, everyone was so upset about missing their friends, but I don't really have that many friends.

I was going to miss the art classroom the most, it's where I feel like I can be free.

Being at home all the time just tightened dad's control over mom and me.

It was like being in prison, like the house had become 10 times smaller than it used to be, and dad had grown 10 times bigger.

We used to see mum's family at the weekends, because they only live a few streets away, but during the lockdown, dad wouldn't even let mum FaceTime them.

I think I was one of the only pupils in school who didn't enjoy being at home all the time.

It didn't feel relaxing at all.

It made me feel like I couldn't breathe properly.

One night we were all sitting watching the Prime Minister on TV, and he said that people who were experiencing domestic abuse, could move to a different house in order to be safe.

I think something clicked in mum's head then, although she didn't know it, because the next morning I found her packing up a few bits for her and baby Amir.

She asked me to get together some clothes and school stuff too and the next time dad went out to the shops, we all left and went to Grandma's a few streets away.

Grandma's face lit up when she opened the door and then turned to sadness, the second she saw my mum's bruises and tired eyes straight away.

She put the kettle on and then handed my mum her phone saying that she had to call the police.

We were all crying by then, even Amir, but I don't think he knew why.

Grandma had her arms around me and she just kept saying, you are safe now, you are safe.

Living at Grandma's isn't bad at all.

There's less space than there was at home, and the kitchen and living room are always packed with friends and neighbours and cousins and aunties, but the house is full of laughter this time, and the only shouting is to tell me to come down for dinner.

The police arrested dad and arranged for mum and I to go around our old house and collect the rest of our things.

We also got lots of support from the mosque.

The Imam raised the money to buy me a new tablet so I could take part in school lessons again and talk to my classmates.

Everyone made sure that we had everything we needed and felt like our big extended family, which made me really proud to be a Muslim.

Sometimes my head still feels full of worries and I go down to Mrs. Khan's classroom for one of those big pieces of paper to paint on.

When I came back to school after dad was arrested, I told Mrs. Khan what had happened.

She asked me if it was okay to tell some other teachers about this and make sure that my mum and I had the right support, and I said yes.

Once she had spoken to mum and grandma, she arranged for me to see the school counsellor, who has an office just down the corridor from the art classrooms, so I've seen her walking past a couple of times.

Mrs. Khan says that it's normal for me to still worry, and it's okay to miss my old house, and even my dad sometimes, even though he was hurting us.

The school counsellor helps me work through all of the worries that still feel big.

All my teachers know what happened, but not all of them really know what to say.

Mrs Khan is different.

She doesn't look at me with sad eyes like she's about to cry.

She doesn't look at me with sad eyes like she's about to cry, but she lets me talk about stuff if I want to.

I think she understands that Asian parents can be strict, but that what my dad was doing was far worse than that.

The first piece of art I finished after all this happened was a giant sunset.

I used lots of yellows, oranges, and white, and I noticed that those were the colours I had never really used much before.

Mrs. Khan loved it and she even asked if she could show it to my school counsellor who loved it as well.

They both agreed that they thought it marked the end of something and that although things were still hard for me, they were slowly getting better and soon the sun will shine again.