Hundreds of young women from Pakistan's small Christian minority have been trafficked to China as brides in recent months as their community is targeted in an aggressive new marriage market, activists and officials say.
In this April 14, 2019 photo, Muqadas Ashraf speaks to The Associated Press in Gujranwala, Pakistan. Muqadas Ashraf was just 16 when her parents married her off to a Chinese man who had come to Pakistan looking for a bride. Less than five months later, Muqadas is back home in Pakistan, pregnant and seeking a divorce from a husband she says was abusive.
“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.” “It’s purely supply and demand,” she said. “It used to be, ‘Is she light-skinned?’ Now it’s like, ‘Is she female?’”Saleem Iqbal, a Christian activist, said he first began to see significant numbers of marriages to Chinese men in October. Since then, an estimated 750 to 1,000 girls have been married off, he said.
Muqadas’ mother Nasreen said she was promised about $5,000, including wedding costs. “But I have not seen anything yet,” she said. The city has several mainly Christian neighborhoods, largely dirt poor with open sewers running along narrow slum streets.
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