Criminalising child marriage
CHILD marriage persists in Pakistan for many reasons, and ending the practice requires measures that are sensitive to the problem’s complexity. Debates on child marriage tend to reduce this complexity to two opposing legal positions. Proponents of gender equality and child welfare support higher minimum age limits for child marriage and harsher criminal penalties. Religious parties and lobbies, on the other hand, claim that lower minimum age limits are consistent with Islamic law.
Discussion on the recently enacted Islamabad Capital Territory Child Marriage Restraint Act goes back and forth between these two positions. Investigation into the specific merits of the proposed law reform and its likely impact is lost in the polarised debate.
High rates of child marriage are both a cause and an effect of gender inequality, child neglect or abuse. While proponents of stringent criminal laws are right to acknowledge the harm of child marriage, they fail to answer, or even consider, whether a law that raises the minimum age of marriage and imposes harsher penalties will effectively address this harm.
Islamabad’s law raises the minimum age of marriage of girls from 16 to 18 years. The new law also increases criminal penalties for parents who arrange a child marriage, nikah registrars who register a child marriage, and adult males who enter into marriages with girls. Sindh and Islamabad are now the only two regions in Pakistan with uniform minimum ages of marriage for boys and girls. Sindh’s law, passed in 2013, also raised the minimum age of marriage for girls and imposed harsher penalties.
An aspect of child marriage, ignored by the law and policymakers, is self-arranged marriages by adolescents.
So far, the law in Sindh has failed. A study conducted by the UNFPA and Population Council reported an overall increase in girl child marriages in Sindh between 2014 and 2019: girl child marriages under 15 increased by 1.5 per cent and girl marriages under 18 increased by 2.2pc.
Very few cases have led to convictions. In response to an information request, Sindh Police disclosed that from 2018-2024, 30 convictions under the child marriage law were recorded out of 272 FIRs. Of these, 23 were in the Hyderabad division. In the large divisions of Karachi and Sukkur, no convictions were recorded during the five-year period.
If the Sindh law has so far failed to curb child marriage, why should we expect the law’s impact in Islamabad to be any different? If we are serious about implementing the new law, shouldn’t we try to understand the reasons behind the law’s failure in Sindh?
The persistence of child marriage is partially explained by inaccessibility, inefficiencies and corruption in law enforcement. Another factor, completely ignored by the law and policymakers, is self-arranged marriages by adolescents. Child marriage data does not distinguish between marriages forced by family members and those arranged by young people themselves, but a large number of cases coming to courts and reported in the media involve young people who choose to marry.
While overall law enforcement is poor, evidence suggests that the criminal law is invoked more effectively to target such cases. Until recently, courts in Karachi would send married girls apprehended by the police to the Panah shelter home. When I visited the facility in 2023, staff reported that all married girls sent to Panah through court orders had run away from home to marry their partners and refused to return to their parents after being found by the police. None of the girls referred to Panah were rescued from a marriage arranged by parents or community members.
These cases suggest that law enforcement sometimes successfully recovers girls who run away from parents but fails miserably when it comes to preventing and punishing child marriages forced by family members.
No one seems to want to understand why girls run away from home to marry. I have spoken to girls at Panah and talked to many girls who come to court after their parents initiate criminal proceedings against their partners. Some patterns emerge. The girls typically belong to working-class backgrounds. If they ever went to school, their parents have taken them out by the time they reached their teens, and they spent their days doing domestic work. Most of them run away from home after their parents arrange their marriage to someone they do not want to marry, usually a cousin or other relative.
Some girls shared very disturbing accounts of the abuse they face in their parents’ home. Their only escape, in a patriarchal society that promotes male dependency, was to escape their home with a man. Welfare mechanisms of the state were unable to protect these girls from this abuse. When it came to rescuing the parents’ ‘honour’, the state was quick to react by recovering the girl and arresting the man she ran away with.
It is tragic that, for many girls in Pakistan, elopement and marriage are the only alternative to escape. But any reform measure that seeks to deter and punish this alternative without addressing its underlying cause will fail to promote child welfare. In fact, it will make the girls and young men they elope with more vulnerable to family violence and incarceration.
The possibility that girls may be groomed and exploited by their male partners should be taken very seriously. Protecting against this possibility would require an inquiry into the circumstances around the elopement and marriage. This would involve providing counselling and a safe environment to girls, and trust building within families and communities to enable frank communication.
A law focused on criminal penalties will not accomplish this. Policy measures that promote child education and health, and social reform efforts that challenge patriarchal mindsets are far more likely to address the complex drivers of child marriage. We cannot criminalise our way out of this problem.
The writer is a lawyer
Published in Dawn, June 6th, 2025