Britain has strengthened its laws against child and forced marriage, yet a series of disturbing cases demonstrates why legislation alone is not enough. Children must be protected in practice, religious leaders must understand and obey the law, safeguarding agencies must intervene when warning signs appear, and immigration rules must be robust enough to prevent abusive relationships being used to establish a right to remain in Britain.
Since February 2023, nobody under 18 can legally marry in England and Wales. Crucially, the criminal law also covers non-legally binding religious and customary ceremonies. A person can commit an offence by doing something intended to cause a child to enter a marriage even where no coercion is proved.
That protection exists for a reason.
A 15-year-old “married” while supposedly in care
One of the most disturbing recent cases involved a Bradford girl who was groomed and sexually abused from the age of 13.
According to evidence reported by the BBC, the girl was subjected to an Islamic wedding ceremony with Raja Zulqurnean when she was just 15. Her key social worker reportedly attended the ceremony despite concerns among children’s-home staff that she was being sexually exploited.
Zulqurnean was subsequently convicted of ten rapes and nine indecent assaults against her. His sentence was increased on appeal to 23 years.
The circumstances described in court were horrifying. The victim said she was made to wear Islamic clothing and follow a halal diet, separated from relatives described as “non-believers”, and at times locked in a cellar. She described the episode not merely as grooming but as an “institutional scandal”.
Her criticism is difficult to dismiss.
A child in state care should have been among the most protected children in Britain. Instead, according to the evidence reported in the case, she went missing 101 times between 2002 and 2004, while social workers recorded men collecting girls from the children’s home.
The question is not simply how predators found a vulnerable child. It is how the institutions surrounding that child failed to stop them.
Britain’s first forced-marriage prosecution demonstrated another form of coercion
A different case in Wales resulted in Britain’s first prosecution under forced-marriage legislation after it was introduced in 2014.
A 34-year-old businessman repeatedly raped a 25-year-old Muslim woman and secretly recorded her showering. He then threatened to distribute the footage and harm her family unless she married him.
He eventually drove her to a mosque and compelled her into marriage.
The offender pleaded guilty to offences including rape, forced marriage, bigamy and voyeurism and received a lengthy custodial sentence.
That case demonstrated something fundamental about forced marriage: a ceremony cannot transform coercion, rape or exploitation into a legitimate relationship.
Religious language and ceremonies must never provide cover for abuse.
Imam convicted after conducting marriage of two 16-year-olds
That principle makes the January 2026 sentencing of Northampton imam Ashraf Osmani particularly important.
Osmani conducted a Nikah ceremony for two 16-year-olds at Northampton Central Mosque in November 2023 — nine months after the minimum marriage age in England and Wales had risen to 18.
He pleaded guilty to two offences of carrying out conduct for the purpose of causing a child to enter into marriage. The court heard that the teenagers themselves had approached him and that there was no violence or coercion. But under the new law that distinction does not make child marriage permissible.
Mr Justice Choudhury described Osmani’s conduct as negligent and said that, as someone entrusted by his community with conducting marriages, he should have known the law had changed. Osmani received 15 weeks’ imprisonment, suspended for a year.
The fact that the sentence was suspended will understandably disappoint those who wanted the first prosecution under the strengthened child-marriage legislation to produce an immediate custodial sentence.
The more important point for future safeguarding, however, is that ignorance cannot become an acceptable excuse.
Imams, priests, pastors, rabbis and every other person conducting religious marriages have a responsibility to understand the law. Mosques and other religious institutions should have clear safeguarding procedures requiring reliable age verification before any ceremony takes place.
A Nikah may not constitute a civil marriage under English law, but within a community it can carry enormous social, religious and sexual expectations. Government guidance explicitly recognises unofficial religious and customary marriages for precisely that reason.
Child marriage and immigration safeguards
Another case demonstrates why safeguarding and immigration authorities also need to communicate effectively.
Pakistani national Nasir Khalil was reported to have entered a Nikah with a Slovakian girl four days after her 16th birthday. Reporting on subsequent immigration proceedings says the ceremony was not conducted in a language she understood and that she received little or no instruction before converting to Islam.
The same reporting says Khalil was imprisoned in connection with sham-marriage offending and was deported to Pakistan in 2019. The woman, by then an adult, subsequently travelled to Pakistan and married him again, and Khalil later made a family-visa application seeking to return to Britain.
That does not establish that asylum or family-visa cases involving marriages are generally abusive, and it would be wrong to treat genuine refugees or legitimate couples with suspicion simply because of their nationality or religion.
It does, however, justify asking whether immigration decision-makers have sufficiently strong procedures for cases where an adult’s claimed family relationship originated when the other person was a child or where there is a history of forced marriage, sham marriage, exploitation or safeguarding concerns.
The welfare and history of the potentially exploited person must be central.
Parallels with the experiences of vulnerable Christian girls in Pakistan
For the British Asian Christian Association, these cases also resonate with our work involving vulnerable Christian and other minority girls in Pakistan.
Reports of abduction, coercion, religious conversion and purported marriage involving underage minority girls have generated longstanding concerns among Christian organisations and international religious-freedom advocates.
But comparisons must be made carefully. Every allegation requires evidence, and an abusive marriage involving a Muslim offender in Britain should not be treated as evidence against Muslims generally, any more than abuse committed by someone identifying as Christian should be attributed collectively to Christians.
The common issue is the vulnerability of the child.
Where religion, family honour, immigration status or community pressure is invoked to legitimise a relationship involving a child, safeguarding authorities must be prepared to look beyond the existence of a religious ceremony and ask whether exploitation is taking place.
The law must have consequences
The Government was explicit about why Parliament raised the marriage age to 18: children required stronger protection.
The legislation now makes causing an under-18 to marry an offence even without proof of coercion, and it expressly encompasses ceremonies that have no legal validity in English civil law.
That protection must now be made effective.
Religious institutions should ensure everyone authorised to conduct marriage ceremonies receives safeguarding and legal training. Police, social workers, schools, children’s homes and immigration authorities need effective mechanisms for sharing relevant safeguarding information. Where an adult seeks immigration status through a relationship that began when their partner was a child, any history of exploitation, criminality or forced marriage should receive appropriate scrutiny under the law.
And when children in state care repeatedly disappear or are seen leaving with adults, authorities must act as though a child may be in danger rather than waiting until years later for survivors to establish what happened.
Britain does not need another law declaring that child marriage is unacceptable. It already has one.
What it needs is consistent enforcement, meaningful safeguarding and institutions prepared to intervene before a vulnerable child becomes another survivor asking why nobody protected her.
Juliet Chowdhry, Trustee of the British Asian Christian Association, said:
“These cases should deeply concern everyone involved in safeguarding children. A religious ceremony must never be allowed to circumvent the protections that Parliament has deliberately put in place for under-18s. Whatever the religion or cultural background involved, a child is a child, and their protection must come first.
“Through BACA’s work in Pakistan, we have encountered the devastating consequences when vulnerable girls, including girls from Christian minority communities, become caught up in allegations of forced conversion and marriage. We should therefore be particularly alert when religious marriage, significant age differences, immigration status or a child’s vulnerability intersect.
“The Bradford case is especially disturbing because this girl was already in the care of the state. She should have been protected, yet the evidence heard by the court describes an appalling failure by the very institutions entrusted with her welfare. We must learn from that failure rather than discover years later that warning signs were repeatedly missed.
“I am also concerned that an imam was able to conduct a Nikah for two 16-year-olds in 2023, after the law had expressly raised the marriage age to 18. Religious leaders who conduct marriages have a responsibility to know and obey the law. Saying that you did not know the legislation had changed is simply not good enough when children’s safeguarding is at stake.
“The suspended sentence in that case may leave some questioning whether the consequences adequately reflected the importance of the new protection. Whatever view is taken of the individual sentence, there must now be an unmistakable message to every religious institution in Britain: no religious marriage involving a child should take place.
“Immigration authorities must also scrutinise cases carefully where an adult seeks to establish immigration rights through a relationship that began when the other person was a child, particularly where there is a documented history of exploitation, sham marriage or safeguarding concerns. That does not mean treating migrants or legitimate marriages with suspicion; it means recognising warning signs and putting vulnerable people before immigration convenience.
“Britain has strengthened its laws. The challenge now is ensuring those laws actually protect children. Police, social services, religious institutions, the courts and immigration authorities must work together so that no vulnerable girl is abandoned between different systems of responsibility.”
