Pakistan’s persistent child marriage crisis -disproportionately affecting young girls, especially those from minority communities - continues despite repeated legal cases and a legal ban.
child marriage
She didn’t leave of her own free will. Not really. The process had already begun weeks - or sometimes months - before she walked out the door. A man, often older and persistent, had been building a relationship with her, layering emotional pressure with false promises of love or a better life. By the time she left home, the grooming was complete. In some cases, explicit threats were made; in others, the coercion was quieter and more insidious.
She was a child and an underage child should not be held responsible for a decision
as significant and life-altering as marriage.
These cases have repeatedly made headlines in Pakistan. From Aarzoo Raja in Karachi to Maira Shahbaz in Punjab, they have sparked public outrage, legal debate and international concern. Yet they continue to surface, following a troubling and recurring pattern. The victims are overwhelmingly young. Adolescent girls between the ages of 14 and 18 are the primary targets, while some victims are even younger. Only 18 per cent of documented victims were adults. By religion, 76 per cent of the victims were Hindu and 24 per cent were Christian. Geographically, 79 per cent of the documented cases occurred in Sindh and 20 per cent in Punjab.
The method is consistent. Once removed from their homes, girls are rushed into signing documents they do not understand. The first is an affidavit of ‘free will’ - a sworn statement declaring that they are converting and marrying of their own accord. This affidavit is then used to obtain the second document: a Sanad-e-Islam, a certificate issued by a religious authority confirming the conversion to Islam. The Sanad-e-Islam is, in turn, used to validate the third document: the nikahnama, the Islamic marriage contract. Each document relies on the one before it, creating the appearance of a legitimate and sequential legal process.
But the chain is built on sand. Neither the affidavit nor the Sanad-e-Islam is a legal instrument with the authority to establish a person’s age and when the person signing either document is a minor, both are void from the outset. Pakistani law is clear that a child cannot consent to conversion or marriage, which means the entire chain collapses the moment her true age is established. The problem is that establishing her true age is precisely where the system fails. Most minority families, already economically marginalised, have no birth certificate with which to challenge fabricated documents, because only 42 per cent of children under five in Pakistan are registered at birth.
When documentary proof is absent, courts must turn to medical age assessment and this is where delay is compounded by uncertainty. A forensic age assessment is not a simple test. It typically requires X-rays of multiple joints, including the wrist, hand, elbow, knee, shoulder and hip, alongside a dental examination. Radiologists analyse the development and fusion of bones at these sites to estimate a person’s age. The process takes time to arrange, requires specialist expertise, and even when completed, does not produce a definitive answer. Medical science can only estimate biological age; it cannot confirm a legal date of birth. The result is not a single number but a range, typically spanning two years. A girl who should clearly be identified as 15 could, under this assessment, be recorded as anywhere between 14 and 16. In the critical window where the difference between 17 and 18 years determines whether a marriage is legal or constitutes a crime, a two-year margin is not a technicality. It is an open door.
According to statistics, Pakistan ranks sixth in levels of child marriage in South Asia, with approximately 19 million child brides -18 per cent of girls married before the age of 18 and nearly 4 percent before the age of 15. Only 42 per cent of children under five in Pakistan have birth registrations, which complicates efforts to legally prove a victim’s age in court.
However, the law is very clear in emphasising that child marriage is prohibited, that the consent of a minor is legally irrelevant in kidnapping cases and that sexual relations with a minor constitute statutory rape. Yet, justice remains elusive. A case file analysis by the Legal Aid Society of 26 forced-conversion-through-marriage cases reported between 2018 and 2024 found that not a single case had reached the stage of framing charges. In other words, trials had not even begun.
The human cost of this stagnation is captured powerfully in ‘The Stolen Choice’, a documentary by Aisha Gazdar. A young survivor, given the pseudonym Roma, asks, “Why do I have to go to court today? Why do I have to repeat the same thing again and again? It’s so tough for me. My father isn’t well and I’m not with him.”
For survivors already carrying profound trauma, there is no such thing as a neutral delay. Every stalled case and every repeated testimony constitute a continuation of harm.
Two structural gaps sustain this pattern. The first is that these cases are routinely framed around the validity of the nikah rather than being treated immediately as child protection emergencies. This delays the minor’s removal from the accused and creates conditions in which pressured statements are misinterpreted as consent. The second is the complete absence of a formal mechanism for verifying and registering religious conversions that carry legal consequences, a vacuum that perpetrators exploit with impunity. Countries including Malaysia, Indonesia, the UAE and Egypt have addressed this issue through structured conversion procedures that verify age and voluntariness without restricting religious freedom. Pakistan can do the same.
There are signs that some courts are beginning to get it right. In February 2026, the Model Criminal Trial Court of Thatta declared void the marriage of a 16-year-old Hindu girl, ruling that a minor’s purported consent cannot override statutory prohibitions under the Sindh Child Marriage Restraint Act. First Additional Sessions Judge Muhammad Islamul Haq Arain, the presiding judge, refused to accept a nikahnama that falsely recorded her age as 19, noted that the girl could not properly recite the Kalma-e-Shahadat as evidence that her conversion was not voluntary and ordered criminal proceedings against the accused. Crucially, the court did not ask whether the marriage was valid; it asked whether a child was being harmed. That reframing is exactly what is needed and it should not be exceptional.
The tools exist and the law is clear. What is missing is the consistent and urgent application of both, coupled with the recognition that this is not a question of faith. It is a question of child protection.
Fatima Matanat works at the Legal Aid Society on the prevention of child marriage. She can be reached at [email protected].
