At least 100 children aged 12 or younger referred to UK forced marriage unit

At least 100 children aged 12 or younger have been referred to the government’s Forced Marriage Unit over the past five years, newly released figures show — with campaigners warning that the September school return will expose a grim reality of pupils who simply do not come back.

The data, obtained by the Press Association through a Freedom of Information request, reveals that 27 of those referrals involved children aged five or under. The youngest age bracket is so small that the Home Office withheld exact figures for fear of identifying individuals. But the headline number — 100 children, some barely out of nursery — has prompted stark warnings from one of the UK’s leading campaigners on the issue.

Dame Jasvinder Sanghera, who fled her Derby home at 14 to escape a forced marriage and has spent decades campaigning against the practice, put it bluntly: “I know that when schools open in September, there will be missing children.”

A hidden crisis beneath the school gates

The figures cover five calendar years from 2021 to 2025 and include 62 children aged 10 or under. The Home Office stressed that a referral does not necessarily mean a forced marriage has occurred or will occur — merely that details of an actual, potential or suspected case have been passed to the unit. Referrals come from police, social services, education staff, friends, family, colleagues, or individuals seeking help directly.

But Dame Jasvinder, who was awarded a damehood for services to victims of child, forced marriage and honour-based abuse, said the true scale is almost certainly far greater than the official numbers suggest. “There is inevitably going to be a high number of children and adults whose situations never reach statutory services,” she told the Press Association.

The timing of the release is significant. Schools across England and Wales broke up for the summer holidays in late July. For a child at risk of forced marriage, the six-week break can be a window of acute vulnerability — a period when they are removed from the daily oversight of teachers, tutors and pastoral staff who might otherwise notice the warning signs.

“The opportunity to identify them was pre-school holidays,” Dame Jasvinder said. “Is somebody going to ask where they are, or are they simply just going to go off the school roll? Or children will come back engaged or even married.”

Legal landscape: a crime, but a hidden one

Forcing someone into marriage is a criminal offence across the UK. In England and Wales, the legal age of marriage was raised from 16 to 18 in 2023, closing a loophole that had allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to marry with parental consent. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legislative frameworks, but the principle is consistent: forced marriage is illegal, and the state has a duty to protect.

Yet the figures suggest the law alone is not deterring perpetrators. The Forced Marriage Unit, which operates nationwide, continues to receive referrals involving children so young that the Home Office declined to confirm the age of the youngest individual referred over the past five years, saying disclosure “could potentially deter others coming forward”.

The decision to withhold that data point is itself telling. It acknowledges both the extreme vulnerability of the children involved and the sensitivity of the cases. But it also means the public cannot know just how young the victims are — a gap in transparency that campaigners argue undermines efforts to tackle the problem.

The domestic dimension: no overseas element

Perhaps the most striking trend in the data is the rise in cases with no overseas element — meaning the potential or actual forced marriage took place entirely within the UK. In 2022, there were nine referrals of children aged 12 or under with no overseas element. The Home Office withheld data for other years in that age bracket due to low numbers, but the broader picture is clear.

Separate figures published by the Home Office in April, covering all age groups, showed 58 cases (14% of the total) had no overseas element in 2025 — up from 15 cases (6%) in 2024 and 10 cases (4%) in 2023. The Home Office said this “continues to highlight that forced marriages can and do take place in the UK”.

This is a crucial corrective to any assumption that forced marriage is an import problem, something that happens “over there” rather than on these shores. The reality, as the data shows, is that it is happening in British towns and cities, in British communities, and increasingly without any cross-border dimension at all.

Dame Jasvinder warned that perpetrators often hide behind accusations of racism to deflect scrutiny. “The tactics of perpetrators will be to use that. So they will try to 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 said.

She insisted the issue must be framed as a safeguarding concern, not a cultural one. “Cultural acceptance does not mean accepting the unacceptable. This is abuse. That’s why I’ve always framed it as that, as a safeguarding concern.”

Professionals on the front line: confidence and courage

The question of professional confidence is central to this story. Teachers, social workers and healthcare staff are often the only adults outside the family who see at-risk children regularly. But raising concerns about a child’s family can be fraught — particularly when the family is from a minority community and professionals fear being accused of racism or cultural insensitivity.

Dame Jasvinder said that fear still exists among professionals. “I do feel that it still does exist in terms of professionals having the confidence to report such safeguarding concerns,” she said. She recalled a recent visit to a sixth form school where she spoke about her own life. Some boys walked out. A number of girls approached her afterwards to say they were facing forced marriages.

That anecdote underscores the reality that forced marriage is not a historical relic or a distant problem. It is happening now, in British schools, to British children. And the window for intervention is often narrow — a single term, a single holiday, a single missed opportunity to ask the right question.

The Department for Education said in response to the figures: “There is nothing more important than the safety of our children. Our strengthened keeping children safe in education guidance provides staff with robust information to help identify different types of abuse and harm — including abusive behaviour such as forced marriage — and clearly sets out what all school staff should know and do, and how to respond to any concerns about a child.”

The department also pointed to the new relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) curriculum, which will teach pupils from this September about positive relationships, staying safe, recognising and reporting risks and abuse — with different forms of abuse “addressed sensitively and clearly at appropriate ages”.

The September test: will schools ask where the missing children are?

As the new academic year begins, the question posed by Dame Jasvinder hangs over every school in the country: when a child does not return after the summer break, will anyone ask why?

The Home Office’s official position is that forced marriage is “not a problem specific to one country, religion or culture; there is no archetypal victim or perpetrator, and no 2 cases are the same”. That framing is important — it resists stereotyping while acknowledging the issue exists across communities.

But the figures released this week suggest the system is still failing to identify cases early enough. A child referred to the Forced Marriage Unit at age five is not a child who slipped through the net once. They are a child who was in the net, and the net did not hold.

The rise in domestic-only cases — from 4% to 14% of all referrals in just two years — points to a shift in how forced marriage operates in the UK. It is no longer, if it ever was, primarily a matter of taking a child abroad for a wedding. It is happening in British homes, in British communities, and it is happening to children who should be in British classrooms.

For teachers returning to school this week, the message from campaigners is clear: the law is on your side, the guidance is in place, and the question you must ask when a child does not appear on the register is not whether it is your place to ask — but whether you can live with not asking.

Dame Jasvinder’s warning — “I know that when schools open in September, there will be missing children” — is not a prediction of failure. It is a call to action. The children are out there. The question is whether the system will find them before the perpetrators do.

By Erica Thornton, Staff Writer

This article was produced with AI-assisted research and editorial support. Sources: The Independent (Press Association).