By Michael Arizanti
In Pakistan, girls as young as 12 are being abducted, married off, and forcibly converted to Islam — and the state is looking the other way. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is not a regional anomaly. It is a systemic, documented, and relentless pattern of abuse that Pakistan’s institutions have chosen, year after year, to tolerate.
A new statement from a coalition of UN Special Rapporteurs makes that indictment impossible to ignore. Seven independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council have expressed serious alarm over the continued abduction and forced religious conversion through marriage of women and girls from minority communities. The numbers are stark: in 2025 alone, roughly three in four victims were Hindu, one in four were Christian, and nearly 80 percent of all recorded incidents occurred in just one province — Sindh. The girls targeted are predominantly between 14 and 18 years old. Some are younger.
Let that sink in. This is not ambiguity. This is not a complex geopolitical dispute. This is the systematic targeting of the most vulnerable — poor, minority, female, and young — with near-total impunity.
A Crime Hiding in Plain Sight
What makes this crisis so corrosive is not just the abuse itself, but the institutional machinery that allows it to persist. When families of victims attempt to file complaints, law enforcement officers routinely dismiss them. Investigations, when they happen at all, are slow, half-hearted, and deliberately incomplete. Age verification — the most basic procedural safeguard — is casually ignored. A child’s stated age becomes whatever is convenient for perpetuating the marriage.
This is not systemic failure. This is systemic choice.
The UN experts are clear-eyed about this. They note that impunity is not a bug in Pakistan’s response to forced conversions — it is the engine that drives the practice forward. When perpetrators know there are no consequences, the cycle accelerates. When institutions signal, through inaction, that minority women and girls are expendable, they become targets.
Poverty and social marginalization compound every risk. These women and girls already live at the margins — excluded from power, excluded from protection, exposed to physical and sexual violence that follows their forced conversion and marriage. The trauma is layered and compounding: abduction, coercion, religious transformation against their will, isolation from family, and then the near-impossibility of legal recourse in a system that was never built to protect them.
The Legal Gap Pakistan Refuses to Close
Pakistan has the tools to act. What it lacks is the will.
Three demands from the UN experts stand out for their directness. First: raise the minimum age of marriage to 18 across all provinces and territories, without exception. Pakistan currently has no uniform national standard, allowing provincial inconsistency to serve as cover for child marriage. Second: criminalize forced religious conversion as a distinct offense. Right now it does not exist as a standalone crime — an extraordinary omission that leaves prosecutors without legal footing and perpetrators without risk. Third: enforce existing laws on human trafficking and sexual violence with the same vigor that Pakistani authorities have applied elsewhere when political will exists.
None of these measures require new international frameworks. They require political courage and institutional accountability — precisely the resources Pakistan has declined to deploy.
Equality Is Not Negotiable
At the heart of this crisis lies a straightforward principle: freedom of religion or belief belongs to every person, not every government. Any conversion that is coerced is not a conversion — it is a violation. Any marriage in which a child cannot legally give free and full consent is not a marriage — it is an assault. International human rights law does not leave room for cultural exceptions on these points.
The UN experts have sent formal communications. They have issued press releases. This is now the third time in three years that the global human rights community has raised formal alarm over the same crisis in the same country. The pattern of repetition is itself a verdict: Pakistan has heard the warnings, and Pakistan has chosen inaction.
That choice has a cost. It is measured in the lives of girls who will be abducted this week, this month, this year. It is measured in families whose complaints will be laughed out of a police station. It is measured in the slow erosion of the idea that minority communities in Pakistan have equal standing before the law.
What Accountability Actually Looks Like
The experts’ call for comprehensive victim support — safe shelters, legal aid, psychological counseling, reintegration programs — is not a luxury. It is the baseline of a state that takes its obligations seriously. So far, Pakistan has not met it.
The international community must do more than document. Diplomatic pressure, bilateral accountability mechanisms, and conditions attached to international partnerships must all be on the table. Naming a crisis without consequence is not advocacy — it is performance.
Pakistan can change course. The legal reforms needed are known. The political will required is not mysterious. What is missing is the decision to treat minority women and girls as full human beings, entitled to the same freedoms and the same protection as everyone else.
Until that decision is made, the abductions will continue. The conversions will continue. And the impunity that makes both possible will continue — as predictable as it is inexcusable.
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