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Apna Ghar is many Christian women's only hope. Eiga Francis Kenny, 33, began the project in 1999. She is daughter of CLAAS's founder and director, Joseph Francis. She often cried as she heard dozens of mostly poor, unskilled, illiterate Christian women and girls tell stories of rape, batterings, abandonment, forced conversions to Islam, and their attempts to flee violence and persecution. They often had no place to go and no means for a livelihood—except prostitution.

"In Pakistan, the fate of all poor women is the same, whether they are Christian or Muslim," she says. "They're beaten, tortured, hit, abducted. But Christian women are more subjected to this because they are low [in status], and income-wise, they are very weak, with no political access."

So volunteers created an emergency women's shelter in a room above the CLAAS office. In 2000, to improve security and provide a more home-like environment, Apna Ghar moved to a secret group home in greater Lahore.

Few Rights
Muslims use a combination of law and custom to make conversions stick. "When [a Christian woman] is kidnapped or abducted and taken to court, she has been threatened in such a way that she cannot raise her voice, and she has to accept whatever the abductor [tells] her to do," says Sunita Cornelius, CLAAS's office manager. Muslim witnesses then certify she's Muslim and force her to marry.

Once a Muslim asserts in court that a Christian woman has converted to Islam, no law enforcement officer will bother confirming consent, though Pakistani law doesn't support this practice.

These same laws and customs create other injustices. According to the British Broadcasting Corporation, as of December 2003 more than 20,000 women languished in prisons under adultery laws. Their crime: they had been raped. Women who reject men's advances are sometimes doused with acid in reprisal. In a society where a key value of women lies in their ability to bear children, barren women are often abandoned.

According to the World Development Indicators database of the World Bank, the nation ranks below Southern Asia's average when it comes to education: the country's female illiteracy rate is 70.3 percent. In 1995 the maternal mortality rate was 200 per 100,000 live births.

Sometimes, though, the danger comes from fellow Christians and even their own families, in part because it is a culture where parents arrange practically every marriage.

There's Esther, 20, whose drug-addicted Christian husband, who was also her cousin, abandoned her six months into the marriage. She still was forced to live with his family, whose members beat her. Her father stayed out of it. Esther's mother learned of CLAAS from a pastor and referred her there. Esther lived in Apna Ghar for four years, where she studied tailoring at a trade school for Christian girls.

Or consider Shagufta, who hadn't conceived a child seven years into her marriage. Her in-laws beat her and finally kicked her out of the house. When she returned home, her stepfather refused to take her in. Penniless, she begged a rickshaw driver to take her to any church. A local Church of Pakistan bishop referred her to CLAAS.

CLAAS knows of no other Pakistani shelters exclusively intended for Christians and which provide legal aid and security. Pakistan's government and some nongovernmental organizations operate other women's shelters, but Muslims there tend to harass the Christians. "It's not just giving shelter for a person," Kenny says. "It's protecting them from all danger, taking their case to court, protecting them afterward. It's a long-term commitment."

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June 2004, Vol. 48, No. 6