One female narrator strongly implies that when she was a child, her father sexually abused her. As an adult she discovers that a great-uncle did “something unspeakable” to her mother, and fulfills her mother's dying wish to keep that great-uncle away. Multiple less specific references are made to child sexual abuse as a systemic problem in Palestinian, Jewish, and American cultures alike. Multiple older-generation Palestinian female narrators (and secondary characters) entered arranged marriages as teenagers, to both teenaged boys and older men. This was a past cultural norm, and the girls felt a variety of ways about it. In the present day, there is frank, though not detailed, discussion of the sexual assault of both Palestinian men and women in Israeli prisons and at Israeli military checkpoints.