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Each Year, 1,000 Pakistani Girls Forcibly Converted to Islam

Associated Press

   KARACHI - Neha loved the hymns that filled her church with music. But
   she lost the chance to sing them last year when, at the age of 14, she
   was forcibly converted from Christianity to Islam and married to a
   45-year-old man with children twice her age.

   She tells her story in a voice so low it occasionally fades away. She
   all but disappears as she wraps a blue scarf tightly around her face
   and head. Neha's husband is in jail now facing charges of rape for the
   underage marriage, but she is in hiding, afraid after security guards
   confiscated a pistol from his brother in court.

   "He brought the gun to shoot me," said Neha, whose last name The
   Associated Press is not using for her safety.

   Force to convert

   Neha is one of nearly 1,000 girls from religious minorities who are
   forced to convert to Islam in Pakistan each year, largely to pave the
   way for marriages that are under the legal age and non-consensual.
   Human rights activists say the practice has accelerated during
   lockdowns against the coronavirus, when girls are out of school and
   more visible, bride traffickers are more active on the internet and
   families are more in debt.

   The U.S. State Department this month declared Pakistan "a country of
   particular concern" for violations of religious freedoms -- a
   designation the Pakistani government rejects. The declaration was based
   in part on an appraisal by the U.S. Commission on International
   Religious Freedom that underage girls in the minority Hindu, Christian
   and Sikh communities were "kidnapped for forced conversion to Islam '¦
   forcibly married and subjected to rape."

   While most of the converted girls are impoverished Hindus from southern
   Sindh province, two new cases involving Christians, including Neha's,
   have roiled the country in recent months.

   The girls generally are kidnapped by complicit acquaintances and
   relatives or men looking for brides. Sometimes they are taken by
   powerful landlords as payment for outstanding debts by their farmhand
   parents, and police often look the other way. Once converted, the girls
   are quickly married off, often to older men or to their abductors,
   according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

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