“In the ’80s, people started seeing Arab sheikhs, in their 50s, 60s and even 70s, flock here to buy young brides.” Miriam Alam lawyer

HYDERABAD, INDIA—Tasleem Begum didn’t get a new dress for her wedding day. Instead, she put on her usual worn-out outfit, a white and blue shirt with pants and a long scarf, her dark hair tightly braided, and picked up the small tattered brown satchel filled with half-a-dozen Grade 8 textbooks.

But it would be a day like no other.

Her mother said she would walk Tasleem to school. Instead, Shahnaz Begum took her to a two-storey house with tall gates, where she exchanged a few words with two men and two women in the living room. Then her mother took Tasleem to a small room for a quiet moment. There, Shahnaz told her daughter, 14 years old with almond eyes and dimples, that she was getting married. Her husband was to be a 61-year-old from Oman.

April 15, 2014, is the day Tasleem got married and divorced. Though, she didn’t know about the divorce until much later.

Her mother, Tasleem found out later, had been paid about $700 — the price of the 14-year-old’s virginity.

“I hadn’t even showered that day,” she says. “I was running late for school.”

She is sitting on the floor of a friend’s house, sipping tea. Her voice cracks every time she talks about her wedding, the man from Oman and how he repeatedly raped her during the two nights she was forced to spend with him.

In Hyderabad, in southern India, Tasleem’s story isn’t uncommon. Since the 1990s, the city has been the hunting ground for men from oil-rich Arab countries seeking young, virgin brides — some as young as 11 or 12. The connection between the city’s poor Muslims and wealthy, older men from the Gulf countries was forged in the ’70s and the ’80s by expats from Hyderabad.

The situation has worsened in the past couple of years, becoming a de facto child prostitution supermarket.

But a group of women has taken justice into its own hands: they pose as desperate child-sellers while wearing burkas with hidden cameras in unorthodox “sting operations.”

In two years, they have done more than police have in two decades.

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About 10 million girls under the age of 18 get married every year around the world; 40 per cent of those weddings take place in India. There are economic reasons, like poverty and marriage costs, cultural traditions, concerns about girls’ safety and family honour.

But what is happening in Hyderabad is different.

The city of 7 million is a mix of new and old unlike any other city on the subcontinent. It is a thriving tech hub and a base for companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook, whose gleaming glass towers congregate in the new area called Cyberbad. The Old City, home to forts, bazaars and narrow streets that attract tourists, has a history going back more than 400 years.

The city is predominantly Hindu but Muslims make up 40 per cent of the population, dominating neighbourhoods around the Old City. They are abysmally poor.

It is hard to pinpoint when Arab nationals started arriving in Hyderabad to seek very young, virgin brides. Miriam Alam, a lawyer, believes it began when Muslim men started taking oil and construction jobs in the Middle East and, it is believed, talked about how poor their families were in Hyderabad.

Some expats may have tried to play matchmaker between Hyderabad families and men from their adopted homeland, says Alam, adding that it didn’t start as a child bride bazaar. But “in the ’80s, people started seeing Arab sheikhs, in their 50s, 60s and even 70s, flock here to buy young brides.”

They came from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman.

Soon, there were marriage brokers, who for a steep price could find a child bride for an aging man.

For many poor Muslim families in the Old City, the financial proposition was irresistible. Such families are typically large, with six to 10 children. Once the girls are of marriageable age, which could be any time after puberty, prospective grooms and their families seek exorbitant sums of cash as dowry, which was outlawed in 1961 but remains pervasive in India.

Rather than paying a groom’s family, desperate families were willing to receive money from wealthy Arab men in exchange for a young girl in marriage.

At first, many men took the girls back to their home countries as second, third or fourth wives. Some were treated well, had children and regularly returned to visit Hyderabad. Some even sent money back to their families.

But increasingly the young brides became sex slaves or maids.

Then a 10-year-old named Ameena inadvertently blew the lid off this secret world.

In October 1991, Ameena was on a flight from Hyderabad to New Delhi. She was sitting with an older man and sobbing in her seat. A flight attendant took her aside and Ameena confided that the man was her husband and they were going to Saudi Arabia.

According to media reports, Yahya M. H. al-Sagih, 60, had come to marry Ameena’s 14-year-old sister but he found her “dark and ugly.” He liked Ameena. Her family received about $240 in return.

Ameena was taken off the airplane and the story made headlines for days in India and around the world.

Arab men continued to seek young brides in Hyderabad but it became more secretive. “Neighbours would talk of girls disappearing overnight ... or teachers would realize that a girl was gone when she didn’t show up at school for a few days,” says Alam. “It would turn out that they were married off.”

There was yet another twist. In the mid-2000s, Gulf countries started banning their citizens from bringing in foreign brides without prior permission.

For a while, everyone thought this would end child marriages. It hasn’t.

Men and marriage brokers — Alam calls them pimps — have changed their modus operandi: rich men from Arab and lately African countries arrive in Hyderabad, marry young girls and sign divorce papers at the same time. The divorce papers are dated for a week or two after the marriage. They take the girls to posh hotels and when it is time for the men to leave, the girls are sent home. (Islam forbids prostitution; these short-term “marriages” circumvent that.)

Many families secretly hope the rich foreigner will actually like their daughter and either set her up in a home in Hyderabad or take her with him, says Alam. It hardly ever happens.

It costs a “husband” between $500 and $1,500 for a bride. Typically, the fee is divided between the girl’s family, the marriage broker and the qazi, the Muslim judge who performs the wedding. Sometimes, there are multiple brokers involved and the family’s share shrinks.

The “wife” is left stigmatized — and sometimes forced into prostitution. In most cases, the girls are supposed to stay with the man for a fixed period, usually between a week and a month, during which they are repeatedly raped.

When the man leaves, the girls return home as a divorcee. But in some cases their parents don’t let them back in because they are “unclean” — no longer virgins and of little value.

Schools, too, shun them.

“They have little education, no skills,” says Alam. “It is tough for them to survive on their own ... many of them fall into the prostitution trap.”

They end up in brothels in Mumbai, India’s financial capital.

Some girls, says Alam, are “married” multiple times.

“This is Hyderabad’s curse,” says Jameela Nishat. “There are at least a dozen cases that we hear about every month ... and I know there are many more that we don’t (hear about).”

Nishat, a published poet and activist, is the person to whom most women in the Old City turn for help. She heads the Shaheen Women’s Resource and Welfare Association, better known as just Shaheen. It educates and empowers poor Muslim women, teaching them skills like embroidery and stitching, it has a shelter for abused, ostracized women and it recently started a hotline for child brides to call when they need help stopping a forced marriage.

“But I realized it wasn’t enough when stories of young pregnant child brides abandoned by men would make the local news, tug at the conscience of the people for a few days and then everything went back to normal. Until the next such story.”

While India prohibits marriage of women under 18 and men under 21, civil law based in part on Hindu and Muslim religious practices does sanction marriage among minors. In the case of Islamic law, girls who have reached puberty are permitted to marry, if they agree to the match.

Most young girls are blindsided by the marriage and have no say. “The parents will usually tell the girl that there is no money, not even to feed her siblings and if she marries (the older man), she will be the saviour of the family,” says Nishat.

Few girls complain, largely because of shame.

The solution, says Nishat, was to expose the unscrupulous marriage brokers and the men who prey on children. That’s how the “sting operations” started.

A woman, usually a Shaheen worker, pretends to be the mother of a 12- or 13-year-old girl looking for a foreign groom. She lets it be known in Old City bazaars that her family is poor. When a broker approaches with details of a prospective groom, she agrees to meet. She goes with other women — for safety reasons — and all wear burkas fitted with hidden cameras and microphones.

They record the conversation about the age of the girl and proof of virginity. They reach a bargain about how much money the family, the broker and the qazi, the man who will perform the wedding, will get.

The women promise to return with the girl.

Instead they give the video and pictures to TV channels and newspapers. Nishat says the revelations have shocked people who didn’t know how the sleazy world of temporary contract marriages works.

“Ideally, when a marriage broker is talking about a young child to a man in, say Bahrain, he should think about us ... that we could do a sting operation and his face could be all over TV.

“He should be so scared that he shouldn’t do it.”

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The group has done six stings to date and all have been nerve-wracking, says Shaheen Sultana, 48.

Sultana usually plays the mother in stings. Shaheeda, an outspoken woman in her 20s, plays her young daughter, while Sultana Begum, a fast-talking woman in her late 20s, plays an aunt.

The burkas shield their identities and allow Shaheeda to pretend to be so young.

About six months ago, Sultana heard about a man from Yemen looking for a virgin, not more than 15 years old, and willing to pay about $200.

“I told (the man’s marriage broker) that I needed a foreign groom for one of my daughters,” Sultana says.

They met at a hotel and Sultana says the man from Yemen was bald and seemed to be in his 70s. He was accompanied by two marriage brokers and a man who looked like a guard. The Yemen national saw Shaheeda, who was posing as a 15-year-old, and liked her. Then he threw a bombshell: he wanted to marry her right there.

He was willing to go up to $250.

“We freaked out,” says Shaheeda. “We didn’t know what to do. It seemed for a few minutes that they wouldn’t let us leave.”

Sultana tearfully told the broker that she had sewed a wedding outfit for her daughter. He let them go on the promise that they would return that evening.

Police descended on the hotel room a few hours later and arrested the brokers and the Yemeni man.

Some stories are so appalling that it is hard to believe they are true.

Tayaba’s story is one of these.

“She was just 13 when her parents married her to a man in his 50s,” says Shaheeda. Tayaba had never attended school, was rarely allowed outside the house and like every other woman in the Old City, she wasn’t allowed to look at a man in the eye. On the wedding night, the man tried to rape her and a petrified Tayaba bit him. He phoned her mother, who “gave her some sort of injection that knocked her out.”

The second night, Tayaba’s mother sat outside the hotel room so that she did as she was told. But the 13-year-old had heavy vaginal bleeding and had to be taken to a hospital. There, a nurse called Shaheeda.

“It took Tayaba a long time to tell me what happened ... she was so ashamed,” says Shaheeda.

A mother feeding her daughter date rape drugs is not uncommon, says Nishat. “The mother wants the marriage consummated so that the broker doesn’t ask her to return the money.”

In some cases, the broker gives the money to the family after the marriage has been consummated.

Fatima, 13, was married to a 54-year-old from Sudan in 2011. He gave the family $150, which they used to buy a refrigerator, a television and clothes. He spent a month with the girl at a guest house close to the Old City and then left for Sudan, promising to send her a visa and immigration papers. The family never heard from him again. She has a 2-year-old son with short, curly hair and dark skin.

Every child marriage activist in Hyderabad knows the story of Rehana. First married at age 13, by the time Rehana turned 18 she had been “married” 17 times to men from Arab and African countries. She has a daughter but doesn’t know who the father is.

Her family refuses to acknowledge her now.

Umapathi Sattaru, a high-ranking police officer in Hyderabad with experience in human trafficking investigations, is loathe to call these stories forced child marriages.

“Children being forced to have sex ... is trafficking.”

An imposing man with a booming voice, Sattaru says many young girls from Hyderabad end up in Mumbai brothels because, after they lose their virginity, they are of no value to their family and are usually unwelcome at home. He estimates there are a dozen cases of forced child marriage every month.

When he was posted at the Hyderabad airport in the late ’90s, it was common to see little girls leaving with much older men. There was nothing he could do if they had marriage certificates.

Sattaru says “local politicians can do much more but they don’t. They don’t want to lose votes so they have kept quiet and let the situation be. This is a community that listens to its political and religious leaders ... and they have kept quiet.”

Minutes before Tasleem got married, to Madasari Masaaod Rashid, 61, her mother took her aside and told her that she had to marry because the money would help her father buy his own auto-rickshaw.

Tasleem couldn’t eat anything all day. That night, she was so tired that she passed out as soon as she and her new husband reached a hotel in Banjara Hills, a posh Hyderabad neighbourhood. She remembers waking up in the middle of the night: the man was on top of her.

She says she screamed because she was frightened, and the pain was unbearable. He put his hands on her mouth and raped her.

He raped her seven times that night and the next day, she says.

The pain, she says, got worse every time.

On the third day, when she was alone for a few minutes, she called an uncle. She sobbed loudly and couldn’t talk coherently. Within an hour, her uncle was at the hotel with two police officers. Rashid was arrested along with three brokers.

Tasleem’s mother was also arrested. She spent six weeks in prison.

“If I had known that my mother would have also been arrested, I would have never called my uncle,” says Tasleem. “I didn’t want any trouble for her ... it was so painful that I didn’t know what else to do.”

Tasleem’s family didn’t let her back into the house, saying she had brought them shame. They also kicked out Naseem, her 16-year-old sister, for supporting Tasleem. Her school made it clear that she wasn’t expected back.

The two young women now live with a family friend. Tasleem is trying to get a job, any job. For now, the two sisters attend classes at Shaheen’s office every morning.

But Tasleem is grateful she didn’t end up being “married” again and again, or wind up in a Mumbai brothel.

“I don’t know what I’ll do now ... but it can’t ever be this bad again.”

As for Rashid, he was charged with raping two minors. It turned out that he had “married” another 14-year-old Muslim girl from Hyderabad’s Old City, just days before he met Tasleem.

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