Legislation demanded to end Chitral girls’ trafficking

‘Organised gangs are involved in their smuggling in the name of marriage’

PESHAWAR:

Girls are being bought like cattle heads in the name of marriage and smuggled out of Chitral without inviting any attention and this practice needs to be checked at government level by means of effective legislation.

Tahafuz Haqooq Chitral Movement president Pir Mukhtar Nabi while addressing a press conference at Peshawar Press Club said that the practice of selling and buying women for marriage in this modern age was a matter of real shame for the people of Chitral district as girls are enslaved and smuggled out of the district by paying a small sum to their families under the cover of marriage.

“This is a modern shape of human trafficking. Girls are bought and transported out of Chitral by organized gangs. Often time wealthy people come to Chitral looking for a second wife. No one cares about these poor girls afterwards,” he informed, saying that when childless people marry a girl from Chitral they often abandon them after having a child and these girls are kept like slaves instead of wives.

There are incidents in which Chitrali girls have been brutally killed by their husbands or their families.

“A girl bought from Chitral in the name of marriage was killed in Kohat. Another one was killed in Dir Colony in Peshawar. Yet another one was murdered in Chinot, Punjab along with her infant daughter. Their families know all these things but can’t do anything simply because they are very poor people,” he said, adding that this practice should be banned by means of effective legislation on the part of the provincial government.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 31^st, 2021.