PAKISTANI WOMEN GIVEN IN MARRIAGE TO CHINESE MEN END UP IN PROSTITUTION
FAISALABAD— At first, in her desperate calls home to her mother in Pakistan, Natasha Masih couldn’t bring herself to say what they were doing to her.
Eventually, she broke down and told her mother the full story. The husband had hidden her away in a hotel in a remote corner of China, and for the past weeks had been forcing her to have sex with other men.
“I bought you in Pakistan,” she said her husband told her. “You are my property.”
Her mother turned to the only people she knew who could help, her small evangelical church in a rundown slum of the Pakistani city of Faisalabad. There, a group of parishioners began putting together an elaborate plan to rescue the girl from the hotel more than 1,770 kilometers away.
Natasha was one of hundreds of Pakistani girls who have been married off to Chinese men in return for cash payments to their families, most of them Christians, a community that is among the poorest of the poor in the country.
The Associated Press (AP) reported previously how Christian pastors and Pakistani and Chinese brokers work together in a lucrative trade, aggressively pursuing Pakistani girls who are tricked into fraudulent marriages and find themselves trapped in China with sometimes abusive husbands.
Since then, police investigations have uncovered that many of the women are forced into prostitution in China. A picture of the extent of the trafficking networks has emerged from a series of arrests and raids in recent weeks by Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency, as well as testimony from victims, many of whom were previously too frightened to come forward.
Families are told their daughters will be wed to welloff businessmen and given good lives in China, and the trade is depicted as a benefit for all sides—impoverished parents receive money, while Chinese men find brides in a country where men outnumber women.
But investigators are increasingly convinced that the majority of the girls are sold into prostitution.