Licking Love Off Knives: When Survival Isn’t a Choice, but a Class Privilege

One of the most powerful things about Laam Shamsiya is its fearless willingness to confront social issues that so many have been aching to speak about aloud. It feels as though the series has handed people the permission they didn’t even know they were waiting for—permission to grieve, to rage, to remember. Spend five minutes on Facebook and you’ll see it: the sharing, the resharing, the flood of posts and comments, the tears between the lines. There is a collective exhale happening—a release of long-held grief that the series has made space for. It hasn’t just started conversations; it has opened a portal. A space for truth. For discomfort. For something like healing.

One of the hardest—and most necessary—truths it puts forward is the complexity of a child’s relationship with the person who harms them. The series doesn’t sanitise that pain, nor does it flatten it into binaries. Yousif, the young boy at the centre, carries not just trauma but longing—for the person who hurt him, yes, but who also gifted him toys, told him stories, played games with him. The person he loved. Because sometimes, that’s how it is. Abuse does not always arrive as a monster in the night. Sometimes it comes wrapped in love.

And that’s where it really began to hit me. Not just as a viewer. But as someone who has sat in shelters, listened in therapy sessions, held space for children trying to untangle what happened to them.

During my work with street-connected children, I met a girl I’ll call Sarah. Her mother brought her into a shelter after walking in and witnessing the unthinkable—her husband, abusing her nine-year-old child. She didn’t hesitate. She took Sarah and her three sisters and left. But leaving, as I’ve learned again and again, is only ever the first step. For women like Sarah’s mother, who live on the edge of survival, there is no second step laid out. No safe house. No steady job. No therapy. No Plan B.

She did the only thing she could: she placed Sarah in a “mothers’ shelter,” (after a further systemic abuse in the guise of virginity checks needed by the police to make a record of the crime) and the other three girls in an orphanage. It wasn’t until I wrote about their story on my blog that a beautiful soul reached out. He rented them a flat. Bought Sarah’s mother a kiosk. Filled it with stock. With that simple act—so mundane to many, so monumental to her—the family was reunited.

What made this case so unforgettable wasn’t just the mother’s bravery. It was her poverty. And that’s what we don’t talk about enough. We often reduce these stories to whether a parent believes or denies, protects or abandons. But there’s another variable that changes everything: money.

Poverty is not just a backdrop. It is a determining factor in whether protection is possible.

Because the truth is: many women do believe their children. Many want to act. But they can’t. Not because they lack love. But because they lack rent. They lack employment. They lack options. And in systems not built to catch them, that lack becomes life-defining.

We speak so often about stigma, about shame. But these are often the burdens of the middle class—the luxury of those who can afford therapy, or privacy, or the safe distance of denial. For the working poor, survival is too immediate, too pressing, to leave room for those kinds of choices.

Sarah’s story didn’t end when she entered the shelter. In group therapy, she began to speak—quietly, carefully—about how much she missed the man who had abused her. She spoke about his care, his attention, the way he brought her little gifts. She spoke of guilt—deep, knotting guilt—not because of the abuse, but because he had chosen her over her mother. And now she didn’t know how her mother could possibly still love her. She believed she had ruined something sacred. That is the shape abuse often takes in a child’s mind—not as crime, but as confusion. As betrayal that runs in all directions.

There’s a phrase I carry with me: when you're not fed love off a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off knives. And that’s what I saw in Sarah. What I’ve seen in countless other children. Love, when starved of safety, contorts itself into something you still reach for, even when it cuts you.

As someone who works in child protection and believes in the power of rights frameworks, I’ve come to understand how unevenly these protections are applied. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child promises every child the right to protection, to rehabilitation, to care. But in practice, these rights are far more available to some children than others. Access to therapy, safe accommodation, trauma-informed education, and legal justice is not distributed equally.

So I ask: when we speak about children’s rights, whose rights are we really talking about?

Intersectionality isn’t a buzzword. It’s a necessity. Because Sarah’s story isn’t just about abuse. It’s about being poor. About being a girl. About living in a system that punishes mothers who protect their children if they can't do it correctly. It’s about the stories that don’t make headlines, that don’t get picked up in fundraising campaigns, because they are too complicated, too raw, too... inconvenient.

We must stop treating survivors as a single, cohesive group. The experience of harm is shaped profoundly by race, class, gender, disability, sexuality, immigration status—and so is the possibility of recovery. Some survivors are offered pathways. Others are handed silence.

If we are truly to be a society that protects children, we need to start building systems that don’t just respond to trauma when it knocks on a well-resourced door. We need shelters, yes—but also dignity. We need therapy, but also income. We need protection—but not just for those who can afford to ask for it in the right way.

Laam Shamsiya reminded us of something vital: that abuse is not always monstrous, and survival is not always clean. It showed us love through a broken lens—and still asked us to look.

We owe it to children like Sarah—and to their mothers—to do more than watch. We must listen. We must act. And above all, we must make sure that protection, care, and justice are not luxuries, but rights—accessible to all, not just those born holding the silver spoon.