Like trophies: Pakistani women are abducted in lieu of repayment of loans
MIRPUR KHAS, PAKISTAN : The mother rummages through a large metal trunk, searching for a picture of her young daughter taken away in the night to be the bride of a man who says the family owed him $1,000.
Beneath the blankets, clothes and silver ornaments that she wears with her sari, Ameri Kashi Kohli finds two photos, carefully wrapped in plastic, of her smiling daughters. Ameri tries to remember her daughter Jeevti’s age; few of this country’s desperately poor have birth certificates.
With a grin at a sudden recollection she says, “I remember her sister, my youngest, was born when there was a big earthquake in Pakistan.”
That was 2005. Jeevti was 3 years old at the time, Ameri says. That means the girl was just 14 when she disappeared into the hands of the land manager. Her mother is sure Jeevti paid the price for a never-ending debt.
Ameri says she and her husband borrowed roughly $500 when they first began to work on the land, but she throws up her hands and says the debt was repaid. “We started with a loan, and every time they said they were taking money for our loan, but no one gave us anything to show we paid.” Instead, the debt doubled.
It’s a familiar story in southern Pakistan: Small loans balloon into impossible debts, bills multiply, payments are never deducted. Women like Ameri and her daughter are treated as property: taken as payment for a debt, to settle disputes, or as revenge if a landowner wants to punish his worker. Sometimes parents, burdened by debt, even offer their daughters as payment. The women are like trophies to the men. They choose the prettiest and the young and pliable. Sometimes they take them as second wives to look after their homes.