Report Exposes Egyptian Christian Women Forced Into Muslim Marriages

A new report released by Egyptian women right's activist Nadia Ghaly and anti-trafficking specialist (and guest blogger here) Michele Clark has uncovered an insidious system of the kidnapping of Christian (known as Coptic in Egypt) women. These women are forced to marry Muslim men and in many cases convert to Islam. It's a practice which meets the international definition of human trafficking, but is also a serious issue of violence against women.

Exemplary of this phenomenon is the story of a woman identified as “R.” At 17, she received a phone call from a polite young man who said his name was Amir and that he admired her. He asked her to meet him at a local church. When she arrived, however, she was drugged and kidnapped. When she woke up “Amir” told her she would have to marry a stranger, a Muslim man named Mahmoud. When she refused to have sex with Mahmoud, his family held her down while he raped her. As a result of the rape, she is now unable to have children.

The report does not attempt to identify or measure the prevalence of the Coptic-Muslim forced marriage phenomenon, but rather focuses on documenting a number of cases which meet the international definition of human trafficking. The Coptic population of Egypt is between 8 and 12% of the total population. Are these forced marriages a common or rare occurrence for Coptic women? Do they occur with greater, lesser, or equal frequency with forced marriages within the Muslim Egyptian community or Coptic community? One of the priests interviewed suggested that at least 50 cases of Coptic-Muslim forced marriage had occurred involving women in his parish alone. But data is still lacking on the scope of the problem across the country.

One of the most interesting findings in this report is the consistent patterns which emerge in the process of luring and coercing these young women into forced marriage. Almost always, the process begins with a trafficker earning the woman's trust, and then physically separating her from her family and friends. Personal relationships are key; traffickers aren't just driving around in vans picking up Coptic women off the streets and forcing them into marriages. This trust ---> kidnapping ---> exploitation is a pattern we've seen before from the U.S. to the Netherlands to Japan -- traffickers use trust to lure women to them. The distinction between exploitation which starts with trust and exploitation which starts with force is important because it's much more difficult to make people question those they trust and thus prevent trafficking.

It's easy to look at this report and phenomenon and see a religious struggle between Muslims and Christians, but I don't believe either Islam or Christianity are at the heart of this issue. Forced marriages thrive in situations of power imbalance, both between genders and communities. Egyptian Coptics are a minority group, and like minority groups everywhere, they are more vulnerable to abuse. But whether it's their religion, their gender, or their status as minorities which puts Coptic women in the path of traffickers and the clutches of forced marriages, their struggle is a serious human rights issue which needs to be addressed.

Photo credit: islandspice