The migrant child-marriage scandal that shames Germany

Child marriages rightly outrage us. They shatter our understanding of marriage as a union based on love and mutual trust, and they violate both the principle of individual autonomy and the basic duty to protect children.

Unsurprisingly, then, many in Germany have been disturbed to learn that this practice is more common in certain migrant communities than they had been led to believe. More shocking still is the fact that the German state, despite laws forbidding child marriage, appears oddly lenient, if not outright reluctant, to address the problem.

Earlier this month, the authorities of Baden-Württemberg, after an official request from the AfD, revealed that there had been 358 child marriages recorded since 2012 – when they began keeping track of the crime. Courts formally annulled only eight of them. These are the recorded cases in just one state, so the total number of cases across Germany is almost certainly higher.

The link between the prevalence of child marriages and mass migration, especially (though not solely) from Muslim countries, is easily made. Forty per cent of the registered cases involved Syrians, followed by Bulgarian, Turkish, Afghan and Iraqi nationals. The few annulled marriages included one between an 11-year-old Iraqi girl and a 17-year-old Iraqi boy, and another between a 14-year-old Afghan girl and a 30-year-old Afghan man.

It is scandalous that large parts of the German establishment have long downplayed the problem. In 2011, then family minister Kristina Schröder presented a study on forced marriages which pointed to a high share of cases involving girls of Muslim background. The outcry was immediate. Opposition politicians, including Green politician Cem Özdemir, who is now president of Baden-Württemberg, said she was pursuing her own agenda and fiddling the numbers. Migration experts accused her of ‘Islamophobia’.

Child marriage reared its head again in Germany after the 2015 refugee crisis. The result was the 2017 Act to Combat Child Marriages, which rendered any union void in Germany if at least one spouse was under 16 at the time of marriage, wherever it occurred. Again, not everyone welcomed it. Social Democratic politician Aydan Özoğuz, then the federal integration commissioner, warned against ‘blanket condemnation’ of child marriages, arguing that a ban could leave young women isolated within their communities and without legal rights. She was backed by several leading migration experts and members of her own party. In a parliamentary hearing, one expert pointed to the Geneva Refugee Convention, which mandates the recognition of foreign civil status.

Remarkably, in March 2023, the German Federal Constitutional Court declared the 2017 law on child marriage unconstitutional. The case that prompted the judgement concerned a 14-year-old Syrian girl who had married a 21-year-old Syrian man before a Sharia court in 2015, in Syria. Shortly afterwards, the two fled to Germany, where the girl was separated from the man and placed in a facility for underage female refugees, with the youth welfare office as her legal guardian.

This sent the message that child marriage was not unequivocally wrong. It meant that a regressive practice that had long ceased to be accepted in Germany was suddenly tolerable because other cultures practised it. (Imagine the reaction if the case had involved a 14-year-old German girl and a 21-year-old German man.) Instead of insisting on integration and equality before the law, the ruling paved the way for a two-tier justice system calibrated according to parallel societies.

In 2024, the German parliament agreed on revised rules, which thankfully upheld the principle that marriages involving anyone under 16 are invalid – even if contracted abroad. On paper, the law is now clear. In practice, however, there still seems to be little willingness to act, as the instances of child marriage in Baden-Württemberg show. Extrapolated to the whole of Germany, the findings in Baden-Württemberg suggest that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of girls remain trapped in illegal marriages. So a deeply misogynist system of Sharia law, rooted in religious Islamic scripture, continues to hold sway in a country with a modern legal order.

This failure to get a grip on child marriage is all the more grave because the practice has been seen as inhumane in the West since at least the Enlightenment. In his 1792 autobiography, German-Jewish philosopher Salomon Maimon described the hell he and his ‘wife’ endured after he was married off at the age of 11. Immanuel Kant put mutual consent at the centre of marriage in his deeply unromantic account of the sexual union of man and woman in the Metaphysics of Morals (1797).

Yet the authorities’ fear of fuelling tensions within migrant communities and stoking ‘Islamophobia’ among the German population appears to trump all Enlightenment reasoning. Even now that the numbers are out, the official reluctance to tackle the problem is palpable.

The consequences of this timidity are grave. It leaves victims to fend for themselves, perpetuates parallel communities and undermines the legitimacy of the law itself. Migration may have triggered this situation, but the real problem is our elites’ unwillingness to defend the hard-won values of the Enlightenment.