In Shazia's case, she was accompanied to Pakistan last year by her father, who was born in Pakistan but migrated with his parents to Britain as a child.

After a short time here, her father returned to Britain but ordered Shazia to remain with his family here, despite her protests.

"I didn't know what was going on. He never told me anything. But he told all his relatives that the plan was for me to marry some guy in the village," Shazia said during an interview at the British High Commission in Islamabad.

Then for more than a year, Shazia was made to live as a rural Pakistani villager in the North West Frontier Province - wearing local clothes, cooking food, cleaning the house, fetching water from a nearby well and milking cows.

But all the while, she said she was treated as an outsider by suspicious relatives who were accomplices to the plan to marry her off to a cousin in the same village so he could eventually gain British citizenship.

"They didn't care at all about me, they just cared about that little red (UK) passport," she said. "My year here was horrible. I didn't like the food, the way they dressed. I rarely left the house and whenever I did, I was always followed by 20 relatives in case I tried to make a run for it."

About a year later, Shazia's 18-year-old sister was also forced to travel to Pakistan to join elder sibling, believing it would be a short trip. But she too was being groomed for a village marriage.

"I arrived with only British clothes. I don't even own any Asian clothes," said the sister, who also declined to identify herself.

But she was prepared in other ways. She had heard that British authorities had a dedicated team in Pakistan to help British nationals forced to marry here. Once in Pakistan, she got word to British High Commission officials of her and her sister's whereabouts.

At an arranged time, a team of British officials, backed by local police, drove to the house where the sisters were kept and ordered an uncle to give back their passports before driving them away to safety.

They have since returned to Britain and vowed to not contact their father. British authorities are assisting them with initial housing and a loan.

Khalida Salimi, director of the Pakistani anti-domestic violence NGO Struggle for Change, said her workers have retrieved numerous foreigners, including young boys chained in village homes, who had been married against their will.

"It will take some time to make people understand that parents can't treat their children as commodities," Salimi said. "But in Pakistan, women and children are generally considered as possessions, not people."

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