Abducted, shackled and forced to marry at 12

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Farah, a 12-year-old Christian girl, says she was taken from her home in Pakistan last summer, shackled, forced to convert to Islam and made to marry her kidnapper. It’s a fate estimated to befall hundreds of young Christian, Hindu and Sikh women and children in the country each year.

On 25 June, Farah was at home in Faisalabad, Pakistan’s third most populous city, with her grandfather, three brothers and two sisters when they heard knocking on their front door. She remembers her grandfather going to open it. Then three men burst in, grabbed Farah and forced her into a van outside.

They warned the family that if they tried to get her back “they’d make us regret it”, says Farah’s father, Asif, who was at work at the time.