Wherever there is unrest, violence, persecution, or war, women bear the trauma in often untold and underestimated ways. This year, the advocacy organization Open Doors issued a report about the compounding weight of religious discrimination and gender-based discrimination for Christian women in countries where they are persecuted minorities.

“Far from being gender blind, persecution exploits all the available vulnerabilities that women have, including: lack of access to education, healthcare or infrastructure; forced divorce; travel bans; trafficking; widowhood; incarceration in a psychiatric unit; forced abortions or contraception; being denied access to work or the choice of a Christian spouse,” Open Doors concluded.

I thought of this report—which we at CT Women covered and titled “For Christian Women, Persecution Looks Like Rape”—when I read the news last week about a trafficking ring targeting Christian women in Pakistan and selling them as brides to China. The Associated Press had reported on a list of 629 victims, some in their teens.

The details are so upsetting: “Christians are targeted because they are one of the poorest communities in Muslim-majority Pakistan. The trafficking rings are made up of Chinese and Pakistani middlemen and include Christian ministers, mostly from small evangelical churches, who get bribes to urge their flock to sell their daughters.”

We know the problem is far worse and more expansive than this one investigation. Religious freedom advocates like Open Doors can attest to the compounding trauma of sexual violence on our sisters. And I have seen the aftermath firsthand. When I was reporting from Cambodia a few years ago, I spoke with a teenage trafficking survivor who escaped—pregnant—after being unwittingly married off as a child bride in China.

We went through the journey step by step as she had done with legal counsel and therapists many times before we spoke. She had the timeline down, rattling dates when she met the guy who initially offered her a job in Korea, then the one who arranged her travel paperwork, the one she met for tickets, then an expeditor, driver, and finally someone in Beijing, not Seoul, who ushered her into a home where a man decades older than her demanded she give him a child.

Because of the convoluted trafficking schema, these cases are hard to prosecute. The networks are tough to take down even when authorities are eager to go after criminals (which doesn’t appear to be the case in Pakistan and China this time).

The recent news led me to pray again for the teenager I met in Cambodia (whose name I remember, even though it didn’t appear in the article for her safety), these 629 Pakistani victims, and the thousands of girls and women whose stories remain untold as suffer in abusive, forced marriages or the trauma of their experience if they are lucky enough to escape.

Right now, there is no happy ending to the epidemic of trafficking to China, where the one-child policy left a skewed male population without women to marry, and it can be disheartening to know the problem is far more widespread than we can quantify. But I can continue to pray to the one who knows the big picture as well as all the individual stories of the victims. I pray for the God of all comfort to surround them and the God of all justice to empower authorities to block traffickers and protect the vulnerable.

After all, this is the season when we celebrate the incarnation of Jesus, who himself fulfilled the prophesy in Isaiah, coming to “proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18).

Kate