Concerning new data out of Germany has revealed that girls as young as eleven are married to adult men.
The data, published on October 13, revealed after politicians from the Right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party filed a parliamentary inquiry with a state government.
The AfD inquiry uncovered that since April 2012, officials in the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg, which borders France and Switzerland, recorded 358 marriages involving a child. In only eight of the cases were the marriages formally annulled.
The state government said that there are not currently any ongoing legal proceedings to annul any of them.
One 2020 marriage saw an Iraqi girl, aged 11, married to a 30-year-old Afghan man; the partnership was not annulled.
A separate case recorded in 2023 involved an Afghan girl aged 12 married to an Afghan man aged 21.
Since 2015, 350 instances of child marriage were recorded in the state, which has a population of around 11 million. The data from Baden-Württemberg shows that the vast majority of people who are underage in their marriages are women.
Many of those involved came from countries such as Syria, Iraq and Pakistan, the Daily Mail reports. The annulled cases also involved those from Afghanistan, Moldova, Serbia, Croatia, and Germany.
Because the state authority responsible for the records only deals with marriages conducted abroad, which are referred to it by civil registry offices or supervisory authorities, the figures do not measure every possible case of child marriage in the state.
Taking to X, Nikolaos Boutakoglou, one of the AfD politicians who requested the data, said: “Almost every single child marriage in Baden-Württemberg since 2017 can be traced back to mass migration!
“This was revealed by my minor inquiry to the state government.
“Nearly 40% of child marriages were contracted between Syrians, while child marriages between two Germans account for only 0.3.”
Another AfD politician, Emely Knoll, wrote in a social media statement that action had to be taken in Germany against forced child marriages.
“Child marriages are incompatible with our values. Children have a right to safety, education, and a self-determined future. That is why we need effective protection, early intervention, and decisive action against forced marriages,” said Knoll.
The figures have caused outrage further afield, with US Republican politician Brandon Gill weighing in:
“Islamic migration is bringing untold horrors to the West.”
Germany has faced concerns over marriages of those who are children, who arrived in the country as refugees or migrants.
In July 2017, the country introduced its Act to Prevent Child Marriages, tightening the rules governing the recognition of marriages involving minors – including marriages conducted outside of Germany.
The country’s general rule is that people must be 18 to marry. The German government has insisted it has no nationwide figures for the annual number of child marriages which were registered between 2016 and 2024.
2023 saw a major legal controversy when a Federal Constitutional Court in Germany ruled on a case concerning a Syrian couple who married in Syria in 2015. The girl was just 14 at the time of the marriage – while her husband was 29.
The husband challenged the decision of German youth welfare authorities who took the girl into care and placed her in a youth shelter, arguing that their marriage was valid under Syrian law.
The court ruled that the 2017 law was incompatible with the constitutional protection of marriage in its existing form, and did not rule that child marriage must be permitted or that the country had to recognise every foreign marriage involving a minor.
In April 2024, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Justice published a proposed replacement law to deal with a range of issues.
This proportion of women worldwide married before the age of 18 is highest in west and central Africa, where 32 per cent of women are married before they turn 18.