Sold to China as a bride, she came home on brink of death

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2019/12/12/breaking-news/sold-to-china-as-a-bride-she-came-home-on-brink-of-death/
By Associated Press Dec. 12, 2019

Sold by her family as a bride to a Chinese man, Samiya David spent only two months in China. When she returned to Pakistan, the once robust woman was nearly unrecognizable: malnourished, too weak to walk, her speech confused and disjointed.

“Don’t ask me about what happened to me there” was her only reply to her family’s questions, her cousin Pervaiz Masih said.

Within just a few weeks, she was dead.

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AP investigations have found that traffickers have increasingly targeted Pakistan’s impoverished Christian population over the past two years, paying desperate families to give their daughters and sisters, some of them teenagers, into marriage with Chinese men. Once in China, the women are often isolated, neglected, abused and sold into prostitution, frequently contacting home to plead to be brought back. Some women have told The Associated Press and activists that their husbands at times refused to feed them.

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