Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

Sindh province passed similar legislation in 2013, raising the minimum marriage age to 18. Outside of Sindh and ICT, the minimum age of marriage for girls remains 16.

The 2025 ICT bill was endorsed by the National Commission on Child Rights (NCRC), National Commission on the Status of Women (NCSW), Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, and advocacy groups like UNICEF and Girls Not Brides. The Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutional advisory board, opposed the bill, framing it as influenced by Western agendas and arguing that marriage age should be tied to puberty. Hafiz Hamdullah, head of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) party, urged JUI-F chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman to organize mass weddings of children in protest and said he himself would marry a 16-year-old girl out of anger.

What the Data Shows

Globally, CM correlates strongly with low educational attainment, household poverty and food insecurity, exposure to shocks (including conflict and climate disasters), and gender norms privileging male authority and female dependency. Poor intergenerational economic and health outcomes for child brides also negatively affect the economic growth and service provision capacity of countries with a high prevalence of CM.

Girls are disproportionately affected; in 2019, UNICEF estimated that among a sample of 20–24-year-olds, one in five women was married before 18 compared to one in 30 men. Thus, the following analysis focuses on girls, while acknowledging that all child protection interventions should be applied to boys as well.

Girls most at risk of CM in Pakistan are those living in rural or remote areas, having less educational attainment, and living in a family of the lowest wealth quintile. Pakistan is home to one of the largest absolute numbers of child brides in the world. The 2017–18 Demographic and Health Survey reported that approximately 18–21% of women aged 20–24 were married before age 18, and nearly 5–6% before age 15.

Alarmingly, in Sindh province, despite the 2013 legal reform, the number of reported CM cases has increased since 2015. This rise may correlate with the criminalization of CM and an increased institutional capacity to respond, rather than a rising incidence. Nevertheless, it reflects a lack of effectiveness of the legislation so far in reducing CM rates.

The Socioecological Web Sustaining Child Marriage

Political Economy

At the macro level, multidimensional poverty remains a central driver. Pakistan’s recurring fiscal crises, high inflation, and limited social protection coverage strain household resilience. For families operating at the margins, daughters may be perceived as economic liabilities in contexts where jahez (dowry) practices persist despite legal restrictions, female labor force participation remains low, inheritance rights are unevenly enforced, and educational returns for girls are uncertain. For example, Girls Not Brides found that in Punjab, “poorer households marry off their daughters between 12 to 18 months earlier than stable households.”

Institutions

Legal reform depends on institutional trust and capacity. UNICEF’s Pakistan program has increased birth registration for children under 5 from 27% in 2007 to 42% in 2023, but much progress is still to be made. On top of restricting access to identity cards and school enrollment, the lack of birth registration complicates age verification and legal evidence of CM violations. Police may be reluctant to intervene in “family matters,” and officials conducting marriage ceremonies may not seek to verify ages or report suspicions of underage brides. Girls often lack awareness of or access to reporting channels such as Mera Pyara, a national child safety platform.

Community Norms

At the community level, CM is deeply embedded in social norms surrounding honor, sexuality, and protection. The perceived risk of harassment, assault, or reputational damage can incentivize early marriage as a protective measure. Normalization of the practice is reinforced through local religious narratives, marriage markets, and intergenerational expectations. Research shows that when practices are socially coordinated, meaning families act based on shared expectations, legal deterrence has a limited effect unless collective expectations shift.

Family

A critical gap in child protection discourse is how parents are often framed as either villains or victims, ignoring the structural constraints they face. This does not justify harm, but clarifies why legal penalties alone fail to shift behavior. Parents navigate, among other things, economic uncertainty, pressure from extended family, safety concerns, limited educational access or poor quality, and cultural expectations. Marriage may appear as a pathway to security, social status, or reduced financial strain. A lack of resources and education to break intergenerational harmful practices often results in families making detrimental decisions for their children.

The Individual Girl

At the center of this web stands the girl herself, often with limited bargaining power, constrained mobility, and restricted access to information or legal recourse. Girls themselves are often unaware of the negative effects of CM and may express no resistance to being married as a child. The entrenchment of societal expectations and gender norms from birth can result in girls lacking empowerment and the vocabulary to make decisions for themselves, especially in a culture where respecting the decisions of one’s elders is paramount. For example, among a sample of girls in Punjab, only 4.8% felt in control of who, when, and if they marry.

Connecting Child Marriage to Other Gendered System Failures

CM in Pakistan is not an isolated practice; it is embedded within a broader architecture of gendered inequality that shapes girls’ life trajectories long before and after marriage.

Pakistan has one of the world’s highest numbers of children out of school, approximately 26 million, a disproportionate number of whom are girls. Transition and retention rates from primary to secondary school attendance remain low, especially for girls in low-income and rural households. These gaps reflect deeper barriers than school availability: poverty, safety concerns during adolescence, inadequate school infrastructure, restrictions on transportation to school, among other factors.

Paradoxically, Pakistan has made significant progress in expanding girls’ access to higher education. Women outnumber men in medical school enrollment, yet the country faces a shortage of practicing female doctors. 50% of qualified women doctors do not practice or leave their jobs early, often after marriage. This reflects broader social expectations in Pakistan’s prevailing patriarchal societal system; access to opportunity does not guarantee sustained agency when gendered power structures remain intact. Female labor force participation in Pakistan remains approximately 24%. When families observe that even educated women face constrained employment opportunities, schooling may appear to offer uncertain economic returns, and marriage may constitute a more predictable pathway to social security.

Estimates of the number of children in Pakistan engaged in child labor range up to 12 million. The same populations at highest risk of CM are also disproportionately at risk of child labor. For girls, labor frequently takes the form of unpaid domestic work or paid domestic servitude, limiting school attendance and reinforcing expectations of early marriage. Sometimes, marriage itself functions as a transfer from one form of unpaid labor (within the natal household) to another (within the marital household). CM and child labor both represent premature transitions into adult roles.

Environmental shocks such as the 2022 floods, which severely impacted more than 33 million people with disproportionate effects on women and children, illustrate how climate vulnerability intersects with child protection vulnerabilities, a dynamic explored in greater detail below.

The Politics of Reform

The backlash to the ICT bill underscores the contested terrain on which child protection policy operates. While federal courts have refuted the claims that legislating marriage age goes against Islamic teachings, the coordinated backlash from the conservative establishment makes provincial governments wary of attempting to pass similar legislation.

When legal reform is perceived as externally imposed rather than locally grounded, compliance may weaken. Successful reform requires alignment between legal standards and respected religious or community authorities. For example, in Morocco, Islamic scholars played a key role in articulating jurisprudential justification for the 2004 Moudawana (family law) reform that raised the minimum legal age of marriage from 15 to 18.

Moreover, decentralization complicates enforcement. Following Pakistan’s 18th Constitutional Amendment, which devolved many governance functions, provincial governments hold primary authority over many social protection policy domains. The uneven legal landscape (Sindh and ICT’s marriage age at 18, other provinces at 16) creates inconsistencies that weaken deterrence and complicate cross-provincial enforcement.

Pakistan has demonstrated a sustained willingness to engage with multilateral institutions on child protection. It is a state party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and has periodically reported to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on progress toward its treaty obligations. However, domestic political opposition may reject reforms backed by multilateral actors, framing themselves as defenders of cultural sovereignty against neocolonialism. Multilateral bodies indeed often fail to incorporate sufficient local perspective and meet localization goals. This dynamic does not negate the importance of international support; rather, it highlights the need for reform strategies that balance global rights commitments with locally grounded legitimacy. International actors can provide technical assistance, funding, and comparative evidence, but durable change ultimately depends on domestic political ownership and social acceptance.

Non-Legal Interventions

Awareness campaigns alone have limited impact when economic incentives, meaning the cost-benefit calculations that drive early marriage, remain unchanged. Social norm transformation is most effective when paired with tangible economic support, such as conditional cash transfers tied to girls’ school attendance.

Programming often insufficiently engages parents, religious leaders, and other actors who shape marriage decisions. Multi-stakeholder community engagement produces more sustainable norm shifts than girl-centered empowerment programs alone. For example, Rozan implements community-based programs that move beyond awareness-raising to address underlying norms and institutional behavior. Rozan conducts life skills sessions for girls focused on recognizing abuse and understanding reporting mechanisms, while simultaneously engaging boys and men in discussions on healthy masculinity and the intergenerational consequences of violence. Rozan also trains police and public officials to respond sensitively to cases of abuse. This layered approach, working with individuals, families, communities, and institutions, demonstrates that child protection reform must operate across the socioecological web. By shifting norms around masculinity, authority, and violence, such programs complement statutory reforms and help translate legal standards into lived behavioral change.

Following the 2022 floods, Mashooque Birhmani, founder of Sujag Sansar, a local NGO working to combat CM among other human rights issues, highlighted a rise in CM in heavily affected areas of Sindh, where families traditionally did not engage in the practice as much. Some of these CMs took place before the monsoon rains began, implying that families were marrying off their daughters in anticipation of the physical and economic damage to come. This trend mirrors upticks in forced marriages during previous catastrophic floods in 2010 and 2007. Despite increased awareness of CM’s illegality, families displaced in flood relief camps are often faced with no reliable income and fear a higher risk of sexual assault of their daughters due to a lack of protection inside the home. Marrying the daughter provides a lifeline to sustain the rest of the family through the mehr (bride wealth) payment received in return. UNICEF predicted that, in the face of a similar disaster to the 2022 floods, there may be an 18% rise in CM.

Policy Recommendations

Integrate CM Prevention into Social Protection Systems

Since economic distress is a central driver, social protection systems must explicitly incorporate delayed marriage incentives. BISP is the premier social safety net in Pakistan, providing unconditional cash transfers to low-income households through female heads of households to increase women’s empowerment. The BISP-RSPN Waseela-e-Taleem conditional cash transfer program, which provides cash assistance to families who keep their children registered in and attending school, outlines its objective to “motivate mothers to send their children to schools instead of engaging them in labour,” without mandating proof of unmarried status along with school enrollment or mentioning the deterrence of CM as an objective. BISP should clearly communicate that transfers are designed not only to reduce poverty but to shift household incentives away from all negative coping strategies, including CM. This would embed delayed marriage as a national development objective within Pakistan’s social protection architecture.

Universalize Birth Registration and Digital Age Verification

Build on Pakistan’s existing infrastructure, including the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), which issues Computerized National Identity Cards (CNIC) to citizens aged 18+. Increasing age verification measures should acknowledge that millions of people lack CNIC cards, particularly ethnic minorities, women, transgender people, and those living in rural areas; safeguards must ensure that the lack of documentation does not result in the denial of essential services.

• Bundle birth registration with services families can easily access, such as automatic registration at hospitals post-partum. For home births, train Lady Health Workers, community midwives, and vaccinators to initiate birth registration during postnatal visits, linking families directly to NADRA’s mobile registration units to reduce documentation delay.​
• To obtain a B-Form (Child Registration Certificate), both the child’s Computerized Birth Registration Certificate and the CNIC of at least one parent must be produced. This poses a major obstacle to registering children whose parents are not present or do not have CNIC. Because the CNIC system is structured around verified family linkages, children outside conventional household arrangements (informal marriages, without documented fathers, or in crisis settings) may face barriers to registration. NADRA should continue recommending necessary changes to Parliament, which amends the NADRA Ordinance to expand flexible documentation pathways for marginalized and undocumented children.
• Mandate age verification for marriage registrations, backed by penalties for those who solemnize marriages based only on verbal verification without sufficient evidence.
  

Support Two-Generation Economic Empowerment Programs

CM prevention must address the interconnected needs of caregivers and children. Drawing on the 2Gen Framework used in U.S. anti-poverty and global development policy, interventions should align investments in girls with parallel support for their caregivers. A 2Gen model reframes CM prevention not as an individual behavior problem, but as an intergenerational poverty and opportunity gap. When caregivers experience institutional support for greater financial stability alongside their daughters, delayed marriage becomes both socially and financially rational. For example, when a household receives an education stipend for a daughter, caregivers (especially mothers) should be offered enrollment in a provincial skills or livelihood scheme.

Embed CM Prevention into Climate and Disaster Policy

Humanitarian response frameworks often treat CM as a secondary protection concern rather than integrating it systematically into disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate adaptation, and recovery planning. In practice, this means that early marriage is frequently addressed only after cases emerge, through reactive protection services, rather than anticipated as a predictable coping mechanism in contexts of economic shock. DRR mechanisms rarely include systematic monitoring of CM risk indicators or integrate marriage prevention into recovery cash programming. Emergency cash transfers and livelihood restoration initiatives are often designed without explicit safeguards addressing CM vulnerabilities. As a result, humanitarian response may temporarily stabilize households economically without shifting the underlying gendered incentives driving early marriage decisions.

Implement Legal Reform within a Broader Legitimacy-Building Strategy

To build legitimacy for these policies in the community, stakeholders should focus on:

• Strategic framing that situates reform within recognized Islamic jurisprudential traditions rather than foreign interference narratives​
• Coalition-building across provincial governments, religious scholars, women’s rights advocates, and social protection agencies
• Institutional investment in enforcement capacity, including gender-sensitive policing, dedicated child protection units, awareness for children of safe and confidential reporting channels, and investigation protocols that shield girls from retaliation
• Parallel to legal advocacy, engagement with communities on collectively shifting norms around girls’ education, work, and marriage
  

Conclusion

Aqeela’s story offers a powerful example of what holistic child protection can achieve. As profiled by UNICEF Pakistan, 14-year-old Aqeela, living in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, faced early marriage but was able to continue her education after her mother participated in community-based awareness sessions that explained the long-term consequences of CM. When her mother learned about the health risks, economic limitations, and legal implications associated with early marriage, she decided to postpone Aqeela’s marriage until she was 20. Her father supported her decision. Community-level engagement, information access, and parental openness intersected at a critical moment. This demonstrates that reform can work when the socioecological web shifts in favor of the individual girl. Her mother’s decision reflects constrained agency expanding under new information. Her father’s support reflects changing gender norms within the household. The presence of community programming reflects institutional engagement.

Aqeela’s story also exposes all protection gaps for the individual girl in similar situations. What happens to girls whose mothers do not attend awareness sessions or lack bargaining power with fathers? Whose communities reinforce rather than challenge early marriage? Whose vulnerability intensifies after a climate shock? Whose birth was not timely registered? Whose school is too far, too unsafe, or too under-resourced to offer a viable alternative? Without systemic alignment across poverty reduction, education quality, labor market inclusion, disaster preparedness, institutional enforcement, and gender norm transformation, success remains uneven and fragile. CM persists not because families are uniquely resistant to progress, but because the socioecological environment continues to constrain their choices. Until the incentives that make early marriage appear rational are altered, legislation will struggle to achieve its full transformative intent.

Jasmine Rehman (G’26) graduated from the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program at Georgetown University in May 2026, concentrating on global politics and security.