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'No boyfriend for me', Malala tells Skavlan

Richard Orange
Richard Orange - [email protected]
'No boyfriend for me', Malala tells Skavlan
Malala Yousafzai on Skavlan

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenaged education campaigner, has told Fredrik Skavlan, the Norwegian chat show host, that she could never have a boyfriend like other young people in Britain.

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"Of course not," she answered, when Skavlan pressed her on whether her father allowed her to have boyfriends. 
 
"We must remember that he's a Pashtun father. I can't use a mobile phone. This is first my decision and the decision of my father as well. I can't go to a market without wearing a shawl. I don't have a boyfriend. I can't have a boyfriend." 
 
Ziauddin Yousafzai, who Skavlan invited on stage in the middle of the progamme, explained that "a few things come culturally".
 
"I believe that as a father one should protect one's daughter and one's sons while they are in their teens. Because some teens make bad decisions which they regret their whole life long." 
 
The 16-year-old appeared on the show on Friday night alongside Bianca Jagger and Norway's Princess Märtha Louise.
 
Malala Yousafzai is now living and studying in the UK, where she was treated after she was shot in the head in an attempted assassination organised by the Taliban in retaliation for her campaign for women to be educated in Taliban influenced areas of Pakistan. 
 
Ziauddin Yousafzai, a poet and education campaigner, who has played an important role, both in educating his daughter and in promoting her campaigns, said he had not hot-housed his daughter, as some people have alleged .
 
"People ask me what special training I have given my daughter. I say, 'Do not ask me what I have done. Ask me what I did not do.' As a father I did not clip her wings to fly. Every daughter is made for the stars, let's not clip their wings."
 
 

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