More than 100 children aged 12 and under—including 27 aged five or younger—were referred to the Forced Marriage Unit between 2021 and 2025, Home Office figures reveal.
The official government data, obtained via Freedom of Information requests, exposes what campaigners call a “hidden epidemic” of child marriage in Britain.
But despite the law criminalising forced marriage and raising the legal age to 18 in 2023, convictions remain vanishingly rare. The British authorities are failing children, allowing them to be enslaved by pedophiles—and fear of offending minorities and being labelled “racist” is a key reason why.
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Patrick Christys was blunt. “This is barbaric, medieval and, crucially, we’ve imported this problem.” He noted that Pakistanis account for 41 percent of Forced Marriage Unit cases, Bangladeshis 9 percent and Afghans 7 percent.
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A large share of those cases involve children. The idea that people arrive, kiss British soil and instantly absorb British norms does not survive contact with the data.
Shockingly, some cases even have no overseas element at all. In 2022 there were nine referrals of children aged 12 or under where the suspected or actual forced marriage would have taken place entirely on British soil. Separate 2025 figures show cases with no overseas link rising to 58, or 14 percent of the total.
Modernity report: Dame Jasvinder Sanghera, who fled a forced marriage at 14 and later received a damehood for her work with victims, called the numbers “deeply disturbing.”
She said some children are “promised to somebody from birth,” with the ceremony years later. She warned that when schools reopen in September there will be missing children. “Is somebody going to ask where they are, or are they simply just going to go off school roll? Or children will come back engaged or even married.”
Sanghera also described the tactic used to shut down scrutiny. Perpetrators “will try and put you on the back foot. ‘This is our culture. This is our religion. You’re being racist’ or whatever, to put you on the back foot, to make you look the other way.”
She added that professionals still lack confidence to report. “Cultural acceptance does not mean accepting the unacceptable.”
Journalist Khadija Khan told GB News the published figures are “likely just the tip of the iceberg, because many cases remain unreported.” She said the 27 children under five made the statistics “horrifying.”
“One child being robbed of her childhood and forced into marriage is one too many and it is unimaginable how this has been allowed to happen,” Khan said, adding Britain can “no longer pretend that we have been sleepwalking through this nightmare.” The practice has been happening “under the nose of the authorities.”
She named the communities where it is most common: “The Pakistani community, Bangladeshi community and Afghan community, in many cases the practice of forced marriage has been euphemistic for arranged marriage.” Families do it for honour, to keep wealth inside the family, or in exchange for money. Some make promises at birth.
Dr Taj Hargey, founder of the Oxford Institute for British Islam, said forced marriage involving children should be “condemned without fear of upsetting anyone.” “This should be totally condemned by the Muslim society up and down the UK.”
You cannot import large numbers of people from societies where cousin marriage, honour codes and child betrothal are normal and then act shocked when those practices travel with them.
The Home Office still recites that forced marriage is “not a problem specific to one country, religion or culture.” The 2025 country breakdown tells a different story. Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan dominate the caseload.
Britain raised the marriage age and made forced marriage a crime. It then spent years importing the very cultures that treat those laws as optional.
Professionals who notice a child missing after the summer holidays or returning “engaged” are still expected to worry first about whether the report will be labelled racist. That is not multiculturalism. It is the abandonment of the most basic duty a country has to its children.
The numbers are public. The quotes are on the record. The schools open again this week. The question is whether anyone in authority is still allowed to say what is happening.
