Hundreds of marriages involving underage girls have been recorded in a single German state — including one involving an 11-year-old — while only eight have been formally annulled.
Data provided by the Interior Ministry of Baden-Württemberg in response to a parliamentary inquiry identifies 358 child marriages in records maintained by the state’s responsible authority, which began tracking cases in April 2012. Eight of those unions ended in a court-ordered annulment between 2018 and 2024.
State officials said the remaining 350 cases were closed without a final annulment, through alternative administrative dispositions, such as a spouse reaching adulthood, the death of a partner, a decision not to seek annulment, or a new marriage abroad. According to the Daily Mail, at the time the state responded to the inquiry, not a single annulment proceeding was pending in court.
The figures emerged after state lawmakers Nikolaos Boutakoglou and Emely Knorr of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party submitted a parliamentary inquiry to the state government. Boutakoglou noted on social media that nearly 40 percent of the recorded child marriages involved Syrian nationals, while marriages between two German citizens accounted for just 0.3 percent.
The official statistics include a 2018 case involving a 14-year-old Afghan girl and a 30-year-old Afghan man which was annuled. A 2020 case involved an 11-year-old Iraqi girl and a 17-year-old Iraqi boy, one of the few cases officially annulled. A 2023 case involved a 12-year-old Afghan girl and a 21-year-old Afghan man. Two further annulments added in 2024 included a 16-year-old German girl married to a 25-year-old Pakistani man, and a 16-year-old Syrian girl married to a 27-year-old Syrian man.
The findings put renewed attention on Germany’s handling of marriages contracted abroad, following a surge in immigration from regions where child marriage is practiced.
Germany sought to crack down on the practice in 2017 by passing the “Act to Combat Child Marriages,” eliminating the exception that had allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to marry with court approval, and automatically voiding foreign marriages involving children under 16.
In February 2023, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled that a key provision of the 2017 law was unconstitutional. The court found that automatically invalidating foreign child marriages violated the constitutional freedom to marry because lawmakers had failed to guarantee financial support for vulnerable underage spouses upon separation. The law also offered no pathway for couples to validate their marriage once the younger partner reached adulthood.
In response, the Bundestag enacted the “Act to Protect Minors in Foreign Marriages,” which took effect on July 1, 2024. Under the revised law, an invalid foreign child marriage no longer strips away legal protections such as alimony claims. Underage spouses can now claim family, separation, or post-separation alimony from an adult spouse, shielding them from financial abandonment.
While designed to protect young women from economic hardship, the updated law does not require couples to separate — allowing the domestic dynamic of the marriage to continue unchallenged until the minor turns 18, at which time the marriage can be made valid because the law also ensures retroactive validation. This means couples who married when one partner was under 16 can legally re-affirm their marriage in Germany once both reach the age of 18, treating the union as retroactively valid from day one.
Beyond the legal loopholes, state authorities appear to lack basic data on how these marriages affect young people’s lives.
In response to the parliamentary inquiry, the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Education said it collects no data on whether children involved in forced marriages drop out of school. Nor does the government track the foreign countries in which these specific marriages were originally solemnized.
Meanwhile, according to Euronews, the state-funded YASEMIN counseling center reported 271 counseling cases in 2025 alone, identifying 80 individuals at immediate risk of forced marriage. Thirty-three of those at risk were minors, including four children under the age of 12.
The inquiry was spurred in part by an emergency checklist issued in mid-2026 by the women’s rights group Terre des Femmes, urging teachers to spot signs of forced marriage among school-aged youth.
“Child marriages are incompatible with our values,” lawmaker Emely Knorr wrote. “Children have a right to safety, education, and a self-determined future. That is why we need effective protection, early intervention, and decisive action.”
The state’s passive stance toward child protection fits into a troubling historical pattern of institutional negligence regarding sexual autonomy and minors in Germany. For nearly 30 years — from the late 1960s into the 2000s — Berlin child welfare offices sanctioned the infamous “Kentler Experiment,” in which high-ranking academic Helmut Kentler convinced authorities to deliberately place homeless boys in the care of convicted pedophiles. Higher education networks, youth welfare offices, and state politicians enabled the practice for decades under the guise of progressive childrearing.
While state officials eventually denounced the Kentler scandal as “shocking and horrifying,” the current state-level inertia surrounding foreign child marriages has renewed scrutiny over whether German institutions are once again turning a blind eye to the exploitation of vulnerable youth.
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