When Hina Butt was in her early 20s in Hong Kong, she narrowly escaped a forced marriage her parents set up for her.
Butt is one of the lucky ones. Forced marriages, including both children and young adults who are given ultimatums, coerced, manipulated and even threatened to walk down the aisle, globally affect more than 15 million people, primarily girls and women, according to the Asian Pacific Institute of Gender Based Violence (API-GBV).
While there are no official statistics on the number of forced marriages in Hong Kong, experts say they saw almost 40 cases last year, predominantly taking place in the city’s South Asian community.
In Hong Kong, parents are usually the perpetrators, getting their daughters engaged when they are still children, and then sending them to Pakistan or India to marry when they are older or of age. With little to no option, including no financial resources or fearing for their lives, the young women go through with the marriages, protecting a value highly upheld in Asia — family honour.
A forced marriage takes place against one’s will or has been agreed to but without much of a choice. Women and girls often describe a “feeling” that they could not deny a marriage, or that if they did, there would be dire consequences such as banishment or physical harm, according to Rights of Women.
There are many reasons women and girls get married young. Some families think it protects the family’s honour from the social stigma associated with having unmarried daughters at home and sometimes it’s because of economical reasons — the older the daughter, the higher the dowry, according to Plan International.
Men and boys can also be victims of forced marriages but by far, women and girls have been the most affected, making up 88% of the victims, according to API-GBV. They also estimated 2 persons per 1000 were victims of forced marriage in Asia-Pacific.
But some daughters choose a different route and leave their families. Not an easy decision, with the additional burden of a lack of resources, most end up returning home, and eventually get married, experts say.
Butt was born in Hong Kong to a Pakistani family and almost forced by her parents into a marriage when she was 24 and studying for her master's at University of Hong Kong. But she ran away, leaving her family home, and hiding out in Zhuhai, where she got a job teaching at an international school.
Her father was setting her up for a marriage to a cousin from her mother’s side in Pakistan. Cousin marriage is not forbidden in the Quran and is culturally accepted in Pakistan.
Butt was in the middle of completing her masters degree and dreamt of going abroad to be a teacher. While she was not opposed to marriage, she had no intention to marry anyone anytime soon.
Her father quickly became possessive of her, she said. He controlled the things she wore, the time she came home and the friends she went out with. It was difficult for her to watch her life-long relationship with her father change so drastically after she disobeyed him for her own sake.
“He was basically my best friend,” said Butt.
The minimum legal age of marriage in Hong Kong is 16 with parental consent. But with forced marriages, the issue lies in the young women’s consent, not the parent’s. Even with these cases, Hong Kong does not have any legislation that touches on forced marriage issues.
“It does not have any laws that facilitate bilateral cooperation between Hong Kong and countries like Pakistan or India, which typically tend to be the kind of intended destinations for this,” said Puja Kapai, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at The University of Hong Kong.
Butt was fed up of being told what to do. Her parents insisted she get married, even if it was against her will. So with a heavy heart, Butt packed her bags, said goodbye to everything she had known and ran away to Zhuhai.
She only stayed in Zhuhai for two years after she learned her sister, who was 22 at the time, was due to marry the man that she had rejected. “I don't want any of my siblings to face forced marriage,” she said.
Riddled with guilt and devastated after hearing the news, Butt attempted suicide. She was rescued by a colleague who rushed her to the hospital.
Still recovering from the repercussions of her attempt, she returned to Hong Kong to have family to stay with and help take care of her health. Facing her father two years after was one of the most difficult things she had to do.
“What if you died? What will I do? — Those were the first questions he asked when he first saw me after coming back from China,” she said.
In a study done by The Zubin Foundation titled “Dreams of Pakistani Children” with 25 participants aged between 14 to 22, several participants acknowledged other girls in Hong Kong who had faced forced marriages. Some even reported incidents of Pakistani girls being enticed to travel to Pakistan for a holiday but were instead introduced to potential marriage partners there.
Pakistani girls are sometimes engaged as children while the actual marriage takes place at the age of 18 or above to avoid legal obstacles. Some are allowed to finish their studies and marry between the ages of 20 and 22, the report highlighted.
Butt, now 31 years old, eventually got married by choice. While both her parents may not have been as accepting at first, they ultimately warmed up to the idea.
“Do you think he loves you?” Butt recalled her father asking her. He was surprised at the independence she had displayed, living on her own in China and eventually finding herself someone she wanted to marry, who he could see made her happy, she said.
“If you think so then go ahead, it's your life,” he said to her.
Butt, now a mother to her 3-year-old son, says the journey to love marriage may not have been easy but was definitely worthwhile.
Hong Kong think tank, The Zubin Foundation see cases similar to Butt’s on their support helpline for ethnic minority women. However, most are without happy endings like hers.
Call Mira is run by trained psychologists who offer guidance and resources to issues faced by ethnic minority women in Hong Kong such as mental health aid, social welfare and legal assistance.
The helpline, Call Mira, received calls from 37 women and girls in 2021 who were put through forced marriages.
“I tell people to think of Call Mira as calling your friend,” said Shalini Mahtani, CEO and founder of The Zubin Foundation. “She's your best girl friend, and you're going to ring her if you have a problem.”
Some women call over domestic violence and abuse they face from their husbands, which has been fueled by over two years of on-again, off-again semi-lockdowns and stay at home orders in cramped spaces in Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong Women’s Coalition of Equal Opportunities released results from a survey that included 1,044 females in the city aged 15 to 64 which showed almost 40% of the respondents had experienced some form of sexual violence.
But apart from these abuse cases, Call Mira sees cases of forced marriage among young ethnic minority women — specifically Pakistani women, which make up 60% of their callers — in Hong Kong.
Mahtani described eerily similar situations among some Call Mira ringers. In a recent case from last year where a set of Hong Kong born Pakistani sisters, one aged 18 and the other 19, studying at universities in Hong Kong, were set up for marriage against their wills. The young sisters decided to leave home and seek help at The Zubin Foundation offices.
They believed that in retaliation for objecting to the marriage and running away from home, their father would have them killed.
About 5,000 honour killings of women, the murder of those who dishonour their families, take place every year mainly in Asia and the Middle East, according to a study done by the United Nations.
The foundation had to get police and lawyers involved, with an injunction order against the father on standby, recalled a Call Mira responder, who won’t be named for confidentiality purposes.
With fear, the women packed only the essentials — phones, laptops and a few days’ worth of clean clothes for a stay at a shelter home.
Within minutes of reaching the shelter and switching on their laptops, their siblings and parents were able to see their live locations through a Find My Device app. They immediately received a call from their father and it was only a matter of two days before these women were taken back home.
“Honestly we cannot get in contact with them anymore,” said the Call Mira responder. “We hear from their friends that they say they are okay.”
“You have to just pray for them and hope that the best happens,” the responder said.
Kapai is also one of the legal leads on Call Mira where she deals with such forced marriage cases. In one instance she received a call from a 22-year-old Pakistani woman in Hong Kong fearing her family trip to Pakistan would turn into her parents arranging for her to be married off.
The 22-year-old had her phone and laptop confiscated and was strip-searched by her mother to make sure she didn’t have any other devices on her where she could get in contact with someone and inform them of the situation.
She was overcome by fear and uncertainty — she didn’t have any money of her own for if she chose to leave and was worried about being hurt or abused over disobeying her parents. Ultimately for her own safety, she headed to a women’s shelter that the foundation arranged for her.
But it didn’t take long for things to escalate after a friend had gotten in contact with her telling her that her father was enraged and that they had filed a missing person’s report on her with the police. Her friend called her again, this time saying her mother, who had a history of a medical illness, was sick again and had been hospitalised. Her parents had still planned the trip to Pakistan, but for her the sake of her mother’s treatment this time.
So she chose to leave the shelter and return home that night.
Kapai didn’t hear from her for months until she called and said she had eventually gotten married — not to the man her parents chose for her but to someone else of her choice.
“From research, I know that a lot of women who face abusive relationships or who have been coerced in family contexts tend to make poor personal decisions around life partners,” said Kapai. “It's very, very hard. I think when you have to choose between your own desires and dreams, and then, on the other hand, your parent who's been ill before,”
Whether their decision is to unwillingly go ahead with the marriage or run away from their families, the consequences are equally as difficult to live with. “I think every decision, in that case, is going to be a hard decision,” said Mahtani.