Home Office figures obtained by the Press Association show at least 100 children aged 12 or under were referred to Britain’s Forced Marriage Unit between 2021 and 2025, including 27 aged five or younger. The numbers are real. What they mean — confirmed marriages, betrothal, under-reporting, or a failure of enforcement — is where the argument begins.
Key Takeaways by Planet Today
What the FOI actually counts: A referral is information about an actual, potential or suspected forced marriage. It is not, by itself, proof that a wedding took place.
The age profile is the shock: Of those 100 children aged 12 and under, 62 were 10 or younger and 27 were five or under. Official annual statistics also note that very young cases often involve a promise of future marriage, or a younger sibling of someone already at risk.
The 2025 caseload is larger and more public: The Forced Marriage Unit gave tailored help in 406 cases in 2025. Forty percent involved people aged 17 or under. Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan were the leading “focus countries.”
The law changed; prosecutions remain scarce: England and Wales raised the legal marriage age to 18 in February 2023 and made it a crime to cause a child to marry. Convictions exist, but they are few and often produce suspended sentences.
The political split is over cause, not existence: Campaigners and some broadcasters say the pattern tracks specific communities and that professionals hesitate to act. The Home Office still says forced marriage is not confined to one country, religion or culture — while publishing a country table that is heavily concentrated.
What the Numbers Say — and What They Do Not
The core figure is not a rumour. It comes from Home Office data released after a Freedom of Information request by the Press Association and reported at the end of August 2026 by outlets including Metro, the Daily Express and IBTimes UK. Across the five calendar years 2021 to 2025, at least 100 children aged 12 or under were referred to the Forced Marriage Unit. Sixty-two were aged 10 or below. Twenty-seven were aged five or under. The department refused to name the age of the youngest child, saying even that detail could identify someone and deter other families from coming forward.
That last point matters. So does the official definition. The Home Office states that a referral means someone passed the unit details of an actual, potential or suspected forced marriage. Not every referral becomes a confirmed ceremony. In its published 2025 bulletin the unit also warns that “cases concerning young children often involve the ‘promise’ of a future marriage (betrothal), or the younger sibling of someone at a direct risk, rather than an imminent marriage.”
Those caveats do not make the numbers small. They change how the numbers should be read. A five-year-old on the unit’s books is not automatically a child who has already been through a ceremony. It can mean a family has already assigned that child to a future spouse. Campaigners treat that promise as the start of the harm. The government treats it as a safeguarding alert. Both can be true at once.
The 2025 Official Picture
Separate from the FOI on very young children, the Forced Marriage Unit published its full 2025 statistics in April 2026. That year it provided tailored assistance in 406 cases. Of those, 163 — 40 percent — involved victims aged 17 and under. Eighty-seven cases involved victims aged 15 and under. Social services made 112 of the 2025 referrals, the police 52, and education staff 25. The unit also recorded 1,295 contacts in total, including enquiries that were only signposted.
Year-to-year comparisons are messy. Recorded tailored-assistance cases fell sharply after 2019, bottomed out around 240 in 2024, then rose to 406 in 2025. The Home Office says recording methods changed and that outreach can push the numbers up as well as any real increase in abuse. Forced marriage, it repeats every year, is hidden. Published cases will not match the true scale.
Two other official series sit beside the unit’s helpline. Police in England and Wales recorded 125 forced-marriage offences in the year ending March 2025, down from the previous year. Family courts, by contrast, granted hundreds of Forced Marriage Protection Orders in 2025 — civil tools that can restrict travel, passports and contact without waiting for a criminal trial. The gap between protection orders and criminal convictions is one reason critics say the system contains the problem without punishing it.
Where the Risk Is Recorded
The Home Office still writes that forced marriage is “not a problem specific to one country, religion or culture.” The same bulletin then lists the focus countries for 2025: Pakistan 165 cases (41 percent), Bangladesh 36 cases (9 percent), Afghanistan 28 cases (7 percent), from a total of 34 countries excluding the UK. Afghanistan-linked cases were especially young: 61 percent involved victims known to be 17 or under.
A “focus country” is not the same as the victim’s nationality. It is the country to which the risk relates — where a ceremony is planned, where it already happened, or where the intended spouse lives. Most victims in the 2025 caseload were already in the UK when the unit was contacted.
Cases with no overseas element have grown. Official figures show 10 such cases in 2023 (4 percent), 15 in 2024 (6 percent) and 58 in 2025 (14 percent). The FOI also recorded nine referrals in 2022 of children aged 12 or under where the suspected or actual marriage would have taken place entirely in Britain. For other years the Home Office withheld the equivalent child-only counts because the numbers were between zero and five and could identify individuals.
That domestic slice is the part that undercuts a simple “it only happens abroad” story. It does not, by itself, prove how common the practice is inside British towns. Fifty-eight cases in a country of tens of millions is still a small recorded total. Campaigners reply that the hidden figure is the point.
What the Law Already Forbids
Forced marriage has been a criminal offence in England and Wales since 2014. In February 2023 the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022 came into force. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds can no longer marry even with parental consent. It is also an offence to carry out any conduct intended to cause a child under 18 to enter a marriage, including a ceremony that is not legally binding. The maximum sentence is seven years.
Prosecutions have followed, but slowly. Crown Prosecution Service figures cited in early 2026 put the number of forced-marriage cases reaching a first magistrates’ hearing since 2015 in the mid-twenties. In January 2026 an imam in Northampton received suspended prison terms after officiating a Nikah ceremony for two 16-year-olds — described by prosecutors as the first case of its kind under the 2023 age law. In May 2026 a Nottingham couple received two-month sentences, suspended for a year, after taking two 17-year-old boys to Pakistan to arrange marriages. One ceremony went ahead. The couple said they had not known the law had changed.
Those outcomes cut two ways. They show the statute is usable. They also show that even when a case is built, the sentence can be short and served in the community. For critics, that is evidence the state still treats the offence as a cultural misunderstanding. For prosecutors, it can reflect guilty pleas, first offences, and the need to protect victims who may still live inside the same family network.
How Mainstream Outlets Handled the Story
The first wave of coverage after the FOI was largely factual and cautious. Metro, the Press Association write-ups and several broadsheets led with the 100-child figure, quoted the Home Office definition of a referral, and carried Dame Jasvinder Sanghera’s warning that some children are promised from birth. They noted that schools were about to reopen and that missing pupils after the summer holiday are a known risk point.
Official voices stayed inside safeguarding language. A Department for Education spokesperson said there is “nothing more important than the safety of our children.” The Home Office repeated that forced marriage can happen in any community and that the unit exists to help anyone at risk. That is the institutional line: name the crime, flatten the geography, keep the response professional rather than political.
Honour-based abuse statistics published separately show police recording thousands of related offences a year in England and Wales. Forced marriage is only one slice of that wider tag. Mainstream crime reporting has generally treated the new FOI as an addition to an existing safeguarding file, not as proof of a collapse of the 2023 law.
How Alternative and Campaign Voices Framed the Same Data
GB News presenter Patrick Christys used the figures on 31 August 2026 and did not stay inside the Home Office caveats. “This is barbaric, medieval and, crucially, we’ve imported this problem,” he said, pointing to the Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan shares of the 2025 caseload and to the rise in cases with no overseas link. His argument is that large-scale settlement from societies where cousin marriage, honour codes and child betrothal are more common will reproduce those practices unless the receiving country enforces its own rules without apology.
ZeroHedge and several conservative European titles ran the same data under sharper headlines. They treated the 27 children aged five or under as the moral core of the story and argued that fear of being called racist still shapes whether teachers and social workers act. Dame Sanghera, who fled a forced marriage as a teenager and later received a damehood for her work, described a tactic she says she still hears: perpetrators put professionals “on the back foot” by calling scrutiny racist or an attack on religion. “Cultural acceptance does not mean accepting the unacceptable,” she said.
Journalist Khadija Khan told GB News the published numbers are “likely just the tip of the iceberg.” Dr Taj Hargey, founder of the Oxford Institute for British Islam, said child forced marriage should be “condemned without fear of upsetting anyone” and that Muslim communities in Britain should say so plainly.
Those voices are not inventing the country table. They are choosing to treat it as the main explanation. The Home Office table is public. The dispute is whether concentration equals causation, and whether naming communities helps children or simply hardens prejudice against people who have nothing to do with the abuse.
The Safeguarding Argument That Cuts Across Politics
Sanghera’s most practical warning is about September. When term starts, she said, some children will not come back. Others will return “engaged” or already married in the eyes of their family. The test for schools is whether a missing name becomes a phone call to social services or a quiet adjustment of the roll. That is a child-protection question before it is a migration question.
Karma Nirvana, the charity she founded, has long argued that professionals still lack confidence. Honour-based abuse cases often involve the people a child is supposed to trust. A girl who reports a planned ceremony can lose her family. A teacher who reports it can face accusations of racism. Both pressures push the problem back into private life, which is exactly where forced marriage survives.
None of that requires a theory of “imported medievalism” to be taken seriously. It also does not require the opposite theory — that talking about Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan is itself the problem. The data already name those focus countries. Refusing to read the table does not protect children. Reading the table as a licence to smear entire populations does not protect them either.
What Remains Unsettled
Three gaps sit under the headlines. First, the public still cannot see how many of the 100 youngest referrals became ceremonies, how many were betrothal alerts, and how many were siblings of older victims. The Home Office will not publish the finest age breakdowns for the obvious reason: small numbers identify children. Second, there is no transparent national account of how often a referral leads to a protection order, a criminal charge, or no further action. Third, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own rules and reporting systems, so the England-and-Wales picture is not the whole United Kingdom.
A fourth gap is comparative. Forced marriage and child marriage exist in many countries, including among families with no recent migration history. The British statistics are unusual because the state both records focus countries and insists the problem is universal. That combination leaves a space that political media rush to fill.
The Question the Figures Leave Standing
Britain criminalised forced marriage, raised the marriage age to 18, funded a specialist unit, and still records children under five on that unit’s books. The honest reading is narrower than the loudest television lines and harsher than the official press lines. Referrals are not the same as weddings. Betrothal is not a harmless custom when the child has no power to refuse. Country patterns in the 2025 bulletin are too concentrated to dismiss as coincidence, and too incomplete to treat as a full map of guilt.
The schools have opened again. The law is already on the statute book. The remaining argument is whether institutions will use it when the next child disappears from a register — and whether they will do so because the child is a child, not because the conversation is comfortable.