“I bought you”: A Pakistani woman tells of how she was sold into marriage, taken to China and forced into prostitution, as Pakistan tries to confront trafficking networks preying on the poor.
In this May 14, 2019, photo, Pakistani Christian Natasha Masih, speaks to the Associated Press in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Natasha begged her mother to bring her home from China, but it took an elaborate scheme devised by a small cabal of Christian men in her hometown of Faisalabad, in Pakistan's Punjab province, to orchestrate her escape from what began as an unhappy marriage, and ended in prostitution.
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.
In Pakistan, it has been billed as a massive development program that will bring new prosperity to the South Asian nation, where the average citizen lives on just $125 a month. Since 2015, thousands of Chinese have arrived in Pakistan to work on a multitude of projects. Ijaz Alam Augustine, the human rights and minorities minister in Pakistan’s Punjab province, estimated that more than 500 women have been trafficked to China, while Iqbal put the figure at 750 to 1,000.
The network also benefited from lax oversight by authorities, they said. For example, at least five of the Chinese traffickers were able to enter Pakistan on business visas based on companies that didn’t exist. “If I had told everything that happened to me then, maybe I would have saved so many other Pakistani girls,” she said. “But I was too afraid, too afraid of my brothers. Now I want the people that did this to me to not do it to other girls.”
“When I got home, I yelled at my brothers, ‘Why did you sell me? How much money did you get for me?’” she said. The brothers beat her, but she managed to escape to the home of an uncle. “Always two or three men were the same, and then he would bring other men, ordering me to have sex with them,” she said. “I was living in hell-like conditions, silently weeping, silently praying for help.” She made furtive calls to her parents on her mobile phone.
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