Have you ever done something you thought was just…

Ah but what is life if we do not learn from our mistakes?

Sure it may have blown up in your face but it seemed like something that was unavoidable, how else would you learn how to do what's right?  It was nice of you to stand up for your girlfriend, but clearly this is not the answer.  Through you actions she needs to learn how to stand up for herself, else she will get trampled on for the rest of her life.

You're still young though, it's not the end of the world that this incident happened to you and obviously as your seeing things don't go according to plan.  The best thing you can do now is to learn from what's happened.  As long as you followed your gut instinct then I say you made the right choice.

You may not be happy with the consequences, things may possibly get worse.  But as long as you have learned from this scenario, then you did what you were meant to do.

Well, since I don't know the whole story (only your side of it) I cannot rightly say whether or not you made the right decision. I can say, however, that your decision was with the best intentions. As you saw, that is not always enough. I think that you need to step back for a moment and take another look at the problem.

As you saw, getting directly involved worked to no positive end, but maybe there is another way to help. I like where you are going with the self-help stuff for your girlfriend, but, again, take a step back and reexamine everything. If your girlfriend becomes more assertive with her views and starts standing up for herself more, how would things turn out with her parents? When you were assertive with your views, it backfired horrendously. If your girlfriend does the same, would that not put her in the same position with a similar outcome?

Like I've said, step back for a moment. It may be that your decision was the right one at the given time, despite your description of it being a disaster. But there may be other solutions available for her predicament.

One that may be worth looking into is the possibility of student loans or need-based financial aid. If her parents are so unwilling to help her pay for college, depending on where you look, that may give you enough leverage to score some money for her going to college. For the need-based stuff, you'll need a tax return. So, all that she would need to do is, for a time, stay where she is, living with her parents, and get a job so that she can file taxes. A job as a waitress might be a good place to start, since that is a common enough job amongst college-age people.

If you go to any place that offers financial aid, be they need-based or student loans, with a good enough sob story, assuming it can be proven, you should be able to wrangle enough for a good start at college. In fact, that's more or less what I'm doing at the moment.

And I'm not telling you to necessarily do this, nor am I telling you that this is the best way to get what you want. All that I'm telling you is that this is a possible solution to this whole predicament. As I've said so many times, take a step back and look at it from a differnet point of view. Something is bound to come up.