I Was a Child Bride: Dr. Tamara MC on the Language of Manipulation (Part 1)When she was only 12-years-old, Dr. Tamara MC had a secret wedding ceremony in the middle of the night. Shrouded in pitch black and with no one present but her new husband, a much older man who could supposedly guide her to the kingdoms of knowledge and heaven, this night further cemented Tamara’s place in a highly abusive religious cult. Above all else, men wielding black leather whips forced females to surrender their “nafs”—the Arabic word for “self.” As she put it in an article for Mother Well Mag, the girls in that cult “didn’t know where [their] bodies stopped and the perpetrators' bodies began.”
Now, Tamara has earned a Ph. D. in Applied Linguistics, specifically studying how language can be used to manipulate vulnerable populations. She advocates against gender-based violence and has written prolifically about the nightmarish experiences that punctuated her youth, d0ing as much as she humanly can to prevent this from happening as frequently in the future.
