Hundreds of poor Christian girls have been trafficked to China in a market for brides that has swiftly grown in Pakistan since late last year, activists say
In this April 14, 2019 photo taken in Gujranwala, Pakistan, Mahek Liaqat weeps while she recounts her ordeal in an arranged marriage to a Chinese national.
Brokers are aggressively seeking out girls for Chinese men, sometimes even cruising outside churches to ask for potential brides. "This is human smuggling," said Ijaz Alam Augustine, the human rights and minorities minister in Pakistan's Punjab province, in an interview with the AP. "Greed is really responsible for these marriages ... I have met with some of these girls and they are very poor."
"We busted the gang after the FIA received information about increasing smuggling of Pakistani woman to China where they are thrown into prostitution," Ahmad told Reuters. The Chinese embassy in Islamabad has also raised the alarm over illegal, cross-border matchmaking services that are often a front for human trafficking.
"The gang members confessed that they have sent at least 36 Pakistani girls to China, where they are being used for prostitution," he said.The Associated Press interviewed more than a dozen Christian Pakistani brides and would-be brides who fled before exchanging vows. Pakistan's small Christian community, partially centred in Punjab province, makes a vulnerable target. Numbering some 2.5 million in the country's overwhelmingly Muslim population of 200 million, Christians are among Pakistan's most deeply impoverished. They also have little political or social support.The deeply patriarchal society sees girls as less desirable than boys and as a burden because the bride's family must pay a dowry and the cost of the wedding when they marry.
The city has several mainly Christian neighbourhoods, largely dirt poor with open sewers running along narrow slum streets. Tucked away in the alleys are numerous evangelical churches, small cement structures unrecognisable except for small crosses outside. Brokers also troll brick kilns, where the poorest work essentially as slaves to pay off debts, and offer to pay off their workers' debts in exchange for daughters as brides.
In this April 14, 2019 photo, Mahek Liaqat, who married a Chinese national, shows her marriage certificate in Gujranwala, Pakistan. "I don't have the words to tell you how difficult the last month there was," said Ashraf. "He threatened me."Liaqat said she hadn't wanted to get married, but her parents insisted.
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