Christian girls are the wrong kind of victims

Sep 11, 2020 by

by Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack, The Conservative Woman:

IN April last year, a 14-year-old Pakistani Christian girl, Maira Shahbaz, was kidnapped at gunpoint by Nakash Tariq and accomplices as she made her way home in Faisalabad. She was forced to deny her faith and convert to Islam in order to be married to her already-married Muslim kidnapper.

In a recent statement, Maira described her kidnapping: ‘Nakash and two other men took me to an unknown place at gunpoint, where Nakash repeatedly raped me. He also videotaped me naked and threatened that he would kill me and my family and also upload the video on social media if I told anyone what he had done to me.’ 

The under-age marriage took place in October last year. When her family challenged it in court, her abductor Tariq presented a fake marriage certificate and insisted that Maira had consented to the marriage. He also claimed the girl was 19 years old. On July 28, the Faisalabad District and Session Court rejected his claims and ordered that Maira be released from his home and placed in a women’s shelter.

Tariq filed a petition seeking custody of Maira, and days later the district court ruling was overturned by the Lahore High Court, which found that Maira had willingly converted to Islam and consented to her marriage. The court disregarded her birth certificate and baptismal certificate which indicated her true age, and ordered that she be returned to Tariq to ‘be a good wife’.

The High Court bench, presided over by Justice Shahid Mahmood Abbasi, stated: ‘The statement of Maria [sic] Shahbaz as well as her general appearance unambiguously show that she is a grown-up young lady who seems to have attained the age of puberty and who acknowledges Nakash Tariq as her lawfully wedded husband.’

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