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"I had to work with bruises, pieces of hair would just be out of my head, and I would cover it up because of the shame that is involved," said one victim known as Babita.
The forum was prompted by a rash of violence against South Asian women in recent weeks.
Gurjeet Ghuman, a 40-year-old nurse, is currently in critical condition after she was shot in the head by her husband on Oct. 20. He then turned the gun on himself.
Then Manjit Panghali disappeared -- her badly burned body found days later in a Vancouver suburb. Her husband has been questioned by police in relation to her murder.
And just last weekend, Navreet Waraich was stabbed to death. Her husband is charged with second degree murder.
More than 1,000 women attended a public meeting Thursday night to let down their guard and share about years of family violence.
"If I can improve one girl's life, it is worth my husband's anger,'' said one woman.
She described 20 years of punches, slaps and taunts at the hands of her husband.
She said she had not told her spouse -- whom she still lives with -- that she planned to speak at the meeting. She risked his anger in the hopes of giving other South Asian women the courage to speak out on a subject that is often considered off limits.
"I want other women to come forward,'' she said. "If they don't, their friends, their relatives, their children will suffer the way I suffered."
She was one of many women who took the podium, opening up about horrifying abuse at the hands of their husbands.
"My husband would spit on me, kick me, emotionally degrade me," said Babita, a survivor of domestic abuse.
Others told similar stories.
"I had to work with bruises, pieces of hair would just be out of my head, and I would cover it up because of the shame that is involved," said Kulvinder Lehal, another victim.
One woman described how her husband choked her on their bed as their 17-day-old son lay nearby. Another said her husband broke her jaw with her two young daughters only a few steps away.
The family of Waraich, the woman who was fatally stabbed to death on Sunday, attended the forum.
They pleaded with officials not to release her cousin's husband, Jatinder, on bail and asked for her parents to be allowed entry to Canada to care for the couple's infant child.
B.C.'s Attorney General Wally Oppal, himself an Indo-Canadian, attended the public forum along with community leaders, politicians and social service agencies.
He said there is a deep rooted inequity ingrained in South Asian culture that needs to be addressed. Quite simply, women and men are not treated equally -- he cited the dowry system, where women are treated almost as property, as an example.
He said the community has been in denial for a long time.
"Nobody likes to acknowledge the fact there may be violence in their own home,'' he said. "I think it's time that the community did that and for that reason I think the forum is a very good idea."
Complicating the issue is the South Asian reluctance to look outside the family for help with personal issues, said Narinder Rihal, a support worker at Surrey Women's Centre.
"They are discouraged from seeking help from outside the family,'' Rihal said. "The family does try to help, but sometimes the family is part of the conflict, they can't always see what the real core issue is.
"They are trained and raised to believe that if there is a problem within the family it should be talked about within the family."
One of the goals of the forum was to make abused women aware that they are not alone in their struggles, and to show them where to turn for help.
The forum was organized by Radio India.
With reports from CTV's Todd Battis and Michelle Simick in Vancouver