On 22 August, police found Sameera, a missing 16-year-old Christian girl; she had been kidnapped and raped.
She had also been made to marry her rapist, and forced to convert to Islam.
A 2014 report by a Pakistani NGO estimated that each year at least 700 Christian girls and young women and 300 Hindu girls and young women suffer similar abuse. Many abductors escape justice because the girl is not able to testify freely in court, while her abductor claims she is now a Muslim and freely consented to marry him. Abductors often produce a ‘conversion certificate’.
Battle over forced conversions
So great is the problem that in November 2016 the provincial assembly in Pakistan’s Sindh province unanimously passed a Bill to make forced conversion illegal. However, in January this year the assembly was told to ‘think again’, after Pakistan’s Council on Islamic Ideology objected to it.
