by Sabine Beppler-Spahl, spiked (Photo: Unsplash)
Morally relativistic authorities have long turned a blind eye to this regressive practice.
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’.