Pakistani men force minority girls into marriage & push them into prostitution: Report

In a major embarrassment for the Imran Khan-led government, a UK parliamentary panel report has exposed the condition of Pakistani women from minority communities. Citing the reports of UK parliamentary panel report, Just Earth News said that Pakistani Muslim men target girls from minority communities for forced marriage.

Later, the report claimed that the girls are pushed into prostitution by their "so-called" husbands. The UK report categorically mentions that powerful Muslim men from Pakistan's Sindh and Punjab province forced the girls from minority communities to convert to Islam and marry them. The Muslim men especially target the girls from poor and marginalised families who are not capable of fighting a legal case.

According to Just Earth News, several of the girls are forced into prostitution or sold as sex slaves. The observation comes as a part of a United Kingdom parliamentary panel report published in September this year. Earlier, the panel highlighted how the powerful men, their families, and Muslim organisations practice these illegal activities under the banner of religion.

Surprisingly, these powerful men are unlikely to be worrying about paying penalties for their crime. Further, the report highlighted that the Pakistan government had infrequently taken any punitive measure to support the hapless families who lost their loved ones to Muslim men.

"Forced conversions are being used as a tool for 'silent discrimination' since there is so much publicity for blasphemy cases. The police mostly refuse to register a First Information Report in such cases, forcing families of abducted young girls and women with no access to a judicial remedy," said the report. 

"Besides the police, the judiciary too has played a hand in glove with the majority of Muslims by applying Sharia law instead of the state law in deciding the victim's marital status," added the UK Panel report.

1,000 minority girls forced into marriage every year: 2014 report

According to the report, The girls are abused twice, once when they are forced to convert their religion, and then when their illegal marriage is legalised. Notably, this is not the lone incident when a foreign agency highlighted the grim condition of minority communities in "Naya Pakistan".

Earlier, a report published by Dawn in 2014, an estimated one thousand Christian and Hindu women were forced to convert and marry Muslim men in Pakistan every year. Citing the report by the Movement for Solidarity and Peace in Pakistan, Dawn reported that up to 700 of these women were Christian and 300 were Hindu.

With inputs from ANI

Image: ANI