By Rick Plasterer – Juicy Ecumenism – The Institute on Religion & Democracy’s Blog
The abduction and trafficking of women and girls from religious minority communities in Muslim dominated countries is widely recognized by concerned groups as a major problem for these communities. This came to the world’s attention for a time in 2014 when 276 school girls were abducted in Chibok, Borno State, Nigeria, which gave rise to a world-wide movement for their recovery. At least 130 of these girls have been recovered, but the remainder are still missing. This is actually a substantial recovery rate relative to what can be expected where abduction is a problem.
Commonly, a young woman is targeted for abduction by an extremist group, groomed with contacts on social media, by Muslim classmates and neighbors, or by a Muslim boyfriend, and a degree of social isolation from their families established. Then suddenly they are abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, and married to a Muslim man. Alternatively, a young woman might be suddenly abducted without warning, or as part of a terrorist attack. The targeted woman may be either single, engaged, or married. In the great majority of cases, these women are not recovered, as authorities are complicit and dismissive of claims of abduction or even threaten families who are insistent that the case of abduction be pursued.
Abduction and Forced Marriage in Egypt
The advocacy organization Coptic Solidarity has some of the most extensive reporting on this, as it is quite a severe problem in Egypt, where it is perpetrated by Salafist groups against the largest Christian minority in the Middle East. In Egypt, as elsewhere, police and security services seem complicit in these abductions, conversion to Islam, and forced marriages. Coptic Solidarity observes that “little has been done to address this scourge by the Egyptian or foreign governments, NGOs, or international bodies, According to an Egyptian priest in the Minya Governorate, at least 15 girls go missing every year in his area alone. His own daughter was nearly kidnapped had he not been able to intervene in time.”
AI’s estimate of the Coptic females abducted in Egypt number in the hundreds over the last decade, with Grok indicating about 550 and Gab AI estimating between 585 and 650. These figures are all drawn from unofficial Coptic sources, since, as Gab notes, the Egyptian interior ministry publishes no statistics of abduction and rejects claims of abduction as “fabricated incidents pushed by hostile media.” Even the AI figures may be low, since as Sonja Dahlmans noted in her report for Coptic Solidarity “victims and their relatives are almost always threatened to keep silent, even in those cases where women have returned home.”
The Coptic community in Egypt appears to be in large measure on its own against the threat to its women and girls. As is also found to be the case in Nigeria (where kidnapping is also people’s worst fear), and Christian communities cannot expect help from the police or army against radical Fulani, Boko Haram, or ISWAP, so the Copts cannot expect cooperation from their police or local authorities in abduction cases. A former kidnapper reports that kidnappers receive substantial payment (about $3,000 might be expected as of 2017) for each Christian girl kidnapped.
“Conversions” and “marriages” are of course forced following abduction, the police at times supplying drugs to weaken a young woman’s resistance, and perhaps (as was the case of the Chibok girls in Nigeria) threatened with death for not cooperating. But really, what is happening amounts to abduction and repeated rape. Marriage is to a strict Muslim, perhaps as a second wife, who will treat her harshly with beatings. Girls can be sold to wealthy men in Saudi Arabia or the gulf states as domestic servants, where they will likewise be physically and sexually abused. The ultimate objective of this widespread kidnapping, according to a former kidnapper, is “to strengthen Islam and weaken Christianity.” Depriving the Copts of young women impairs the Copts’ reproductive capacity, while providing Islam with more babies. Additionally, this situation is a corporate humiliation and underscores that the Copts are an inferior community. Unsurprisingly, Copts increasingly see the world as an “us or them” situation, in which one remains within one’s own community as much as possible, and endeavors to support it as a “parallel society.”
Elsewhere in the Muslim World
Although Egypt has the largest Christian minority in the Middle East, and thus many of the known cases, the same story plays out in other places in the Muslim world, as was emphasized at a Congressional briefing in June of this year. While all members of religious minorities in these areas may suffer from inferior status, women in these minorities suffer from sex-based oppression, vulnerable as they are to abduction and forced conversion and forced marriage. As the briefing pointed out, Hindu and Yazidi women are also targets of sex-based oppression in the MENA (Middle East, North Africa) region and South Asia. Part of this is child, early, and forced marriage (CEFM), in which girls as young as nine may be sold as wives. Joseph Janssen of the Jubilee Campaign, which co-hosted the event, related that in Pakistan, police, the courts, and society will accept underage marriage, because it is in conformity with Sharia (Islamic law). “Fraudulent birth certificates, conversion, and marriage certificates are accepted without question by courts while documentation of underage status and minority faith are overlooked.”
Similarly, nearly 3,000 Yazidi women remain missing after ISIS devastated the Christian and Yazidi areas of Iraq. Many of these surely remain captive to ISIS fighters, where they have been “passed from ISIS soldier to soldier as an object, [and] forced to give birth to Muslim children.” There is a Yazidi Survivors Law in Iraq, which attempts to reintegrate Yazidis into Iraqi society, but it does not deal with children of sexual violence or the needs of their mothers, and more generally has “failed to deliver on its promises,” according to Jamileh Naso of the Canadian Yazidi Association. It was suggested that the minimum marriage age in Pakistan be raised to 18 to combat CEFM.
Sex-Based Persecution of Religious Minorities
The Evangelical ministry Open Doors International monitors the persecution of Christians worldwide. It has produced a report during the coronavirus lockdown on sex-based religious persecution (or Gender Specific Religious Persecution (GSRP)), “Same Faith, Different Persecution.” Open Doors stresses seduction, abduction, and forced marriage as a tool to humiliate minority religious communities, in addition to reducing the number of Christian females and increasing the women having Muslim children. Christian women and girls may be lured into a romantic relationship, perhaps with the promise the man or boy will convert to Christianity or is interested in Christianity, or under the guise of the girl learning more about the claims of Islam. Abduction and/or forced marriage results, followed by divorce, with the woman now a Muslim, or shamed as a Christian and thus undesirable as a partner. Open Doors observes that religious minorities were at greater risk of being violated during the coronavirus lockdown.
Men and women experience religious persecution differently. For women, abduction, rape, forced marriage, and sexual slavery are tools for humiliating a minority community. For men, killing, imprisonment, destruction of livelihood (by destroying farms or property) are the methods used. They make men unable to care for their families, again imposing humiliation and poverty.
Open Doors points out that the family unit is the basis for community and is under attack by sexual violence and forced marriage to Muslims. Daughters of prominent Christian leaders especially are attacked, as this is an attack on Christians’ “leadership class,” and has a permanent effect over generations.
A recommendation in the report is that local and community leaders should become more intentional about developing faith-based responses to gender specific religious persecution. “In fact, subsequent years of GSRP research indicate that a substantial, multi-faceted community response to GSRP could be truly instrumental in significantly reducing or even eliminating gender-based persecution as a tactic.”
Also issued during the lockdown and noting as well the increased vulnerability of Christians during that time, the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need issued a widely noted report “Hear Her Cries.” It focused on the abduction of Christian women and girls, which the report’s co-author said is increasing. A summary by the Comboni Missionaries relates that “incidents of Christian women being forced to marry against their will have been reported in more than forty countries. During the pandemic, the rate of abduction and violence accelerated. According to the UN ‘Since the outbreak of COVID-19, emerging data and reports from those on the front lines have shown that all types of violence against girls, particularly domestic violence, has intensified.’ Vulnerable women and children in lockdown with their families are at a greater risk of general abuse, especially in the Middle East and North Africa region. Christian girls and young women are particularly susceptible to attack.” As other sources indicate, ACN believes that part of the purpose of forced marriage and forced conversion is to limit the growth “and sometimes even the existence of [the] unwanted minority.”
The ACN study shows “widespread underreporting” of sexual violence against minorities. Shame felt by victims, families, and communities is the “main reason” for underreporting. Secondly, fear of reprisal from persecutors is a major and “recurring” theme in explaining reluctance to report sexual violence in cases examined by ACN study. Finally, “institutional resistance” from police and the courts means cases do not get recorded and/or pursued. A former kidnapper in Egypt said police colluded with kidnappers, and reported Christian women kidnapped as “missing rather than abducted.” The Egyptian government maintains that the majority of abductions are elopements. Similarly “in Pakistan, the police and courts system are frequently accused of colluding with perpetrators.” Everyone, “including local police, court officials and Islamic clerics seem bent on facilitating” abductions, forced marriages of young girls and the forced conversions of girls as young as six.
Central to the problem is the clash of Sharia (Islamic law) and local tribal norms with official state legislation, which still has some heritage from Western liberalism. Nigeria and Pakistan, for instance have minimum ages of 18 and 16 respectively for brides, but this tends to be set aside by judges in favor of Islamic law (which allows marriage essentially at puberty).
The Human Cost of Abduction and Forced Conversion
There is much tragedy in the world, and high numbers to be quoted with many human tragedies, but as Coptic Solidarity noted at the beginning of this article, the abduction and forcible conversion of Christian and other religious minority women in the Muslim world does not get much attention. Why isn’t there more publicity about abduction and forced marriage of Christian women? As has been indicated in this article, part of the reason is the various Muslim governments’ efforts to suppress stories of abduction, and fear of victimized families. But one of the co-authors of the ACN report “Hear Her Cries,” Michele Clark, has well stated another reason:
“I believe that one reason is that it has something to do with religion. Furthermore, in western feminism, religion and emancipation have not always been the most harmonious and understanding of partners. There is also a tendency to refrain from passing judgment on other religions and cultures. This quickly leads to dismissal, and it is difficult to get around this with evidence.”
But rape, which is basically what the practice of abduction, forced conversion, and forced marriage is about, is, or should be, unacceptable in any culture. As the Christian advocacy group International Christian Concern has explained, rape is being used as a form of persecution, to demoralize and humiliate the women against whom it is practiced, but also to do the same to their families and religious communities. They are torn apart with grief and humiliation with the knowledge of the physical and sexual violence being continually practiced against their daughters, or sisters, or wives, and their inability to do anything about it. Families may be frantic to recover their daughters, sisters, or wives, but authorities may well be uncooperative. Everything about the tragedy continually impresses on the minority families and communities (and the Muslim majority as well) their inferior, degraded status as a “dhimmi” community.
It would be well in closing to notice the 35 women (mostly with photographs included) near the end Sonja Dahlmans report. These and many more essentially live in captivity, subjected to physical abuse in many cases and “marriages” that are in fact continual rape. Their families are in agony at what is happening to them, and their inability to change the situation. Two cases in particular have been highlighted recently, that of the medical student Irene Shehata in Egypt, abducted in January 2024, and Huma Younas in Pakistan, abducted nearly six years ago. These cases illustrate that this long-standing scourge is ongoing, with women and girls continually taken, and the majority of the time, without remedy.
What the United States can do is limited by our willingness to engage diplomatically or apply pressure through the aid given to these countries. The U.S. engages significantly with Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, and Nigeria ($1.3 billion annually, in the case of Egypt). Christians should support these beleaguered communities through advocacy and prayer. Foreign governments do respond, if grudgingly and slowly, when issues of their governance are highlighted to Western publics, and as Christians, we know that God does hear and answer prayer.
________________
https://juicyecumenism.com/2025/08/22/abduction-of-christian-women-and-girls-in-the-middle-east/
