Children As Young As Five Are Being Promised As Brides In Britain Ayaan Hirsi Ali's newsletter this week put a number in front of the public that deserved far more attention than it has received. Between 2021 and 2025, Britain's Forced Marriage Unit received at least 100 referrals involving children aged 12 or under. Sixty-two were 10 or younger. Twenty-seven were five or younger. These are Home Office figures, obtained through a Freedom of Information request, not campaigners' estimates. A referral does not always mean a wedding took place. The Home Office defines it as information about an actual, potential or suspected forced marriage, and officials note that cases involving very young children often involve a promise of future marriage rather than an imminent ceremony. That caveat should not bring anyone much comfort. A promise made over a five-year-old still fixes her future before she can read, before she can choose a friend, before she has any capacity to understand what has been decided for her. The scale runs deeper than the headline number suggests. Nine referrals in 2022 alone involved children 12 or under with no overseas element at all. No flight abroad, no wedding conducted in another country and quietly ignored on return. Arranged, and in some cases carried out, entirely on British soil. Whatever explanation is offered for this practice, distance is not one of them. The breakdown by background, reported by GB News from Forced Marriage Unit data, shows Pakistani nationals accounting for 41 per cent of cases, Bangladeshi nationals 9 per cent, and Afghan nationals 7 per cent. Dr Taj Hargey, founder of the Oxford Institute for British Islam, has said such cases should be "condemned without fear of upsetting anyone" by Muslim communities themselves, and that such practices deserve total condemnation. A reformist Muslim academic naming the problem plainly is worth more than a dozen politicians speaking in euphemism. Dame Jasvinder Sanghera, who fled her own forced marriage at fourteen, calls the number of very young children involved "deeply disturbing." She has also warned that many cases never reach the authorities at all, which means the true figure is almost certainly higher than what any FOI request can capture. Dr Rakib Ehsan makes the same point: most of these children never enter the system in the first place, because a referral depends on someone, a teacher, a neighbour, a relative, being willing to raise the alarm. That willingness is precisely where the failure sits. Sanghera has specifically flagged the return to school each September as the moment a child who has quietly vanished from a classroom becomes visible again, assuming anyone is looking. A missing pupil is not a mystery. It is a data point that schools, social services and police already hold the tools to notice. What they have lacked, repeatedly, in this case as in others, is the willingness to ask an uncomfortable question about a specific community for fear of where the answer leads. Forced marriage has been a criminal offence in Britain for over a decade. Since 2023, the law closes the previous loophole that let sixteen and seventeen year olds marry with parental consent. None of that legislation reaches a five-year-old quietly promised to a future husband inside her own home, because no ceremony has yet occurred for any law to punish. The gap between what the law criminalises and what is actually happening to these children is exactly where this practice survives. Britain does not need a new definition of forced marriage. It needs professionals willing to ask why a child has stopped turning up, and to keep asking until they get an honest answer. "The breakdown by background shows Pakistani nationals accounting for 41 per cent of cases, Bangladeshi nationals 9 per cent, and Afghan nationals 7 per cent."