By Elena Artibani, Academy Analyst Assistant with the collaboration of World Sindhi Congress
Introduction
In Sindh, child marriage and forced conversions are not isolated phenomena but two interconnected dimensions of the same structural crisis, one that disproportionately targets young girls. Despite having formal provincial autonomy, Sindh remains constrained by a power system dominated by feudal elites and religious extremists, while Islamabad maintains a politically convenient status quo.
This political marginalization is compounded by the devastating impact of climate change: recurrent floods, droughts and the loss of livelihoods push more and more families toward harmful survival strategies, including early marriage or the forced surrender of their daughters.
The result is one of Pakistan’s most severe human rights emergencies, where poverty, environmental vulnerability, and religious extremism intersect, leaving Sindhi girls unprotected and unheard.
Political and Social Framework
Today, Sindh is a province of Pakistan, but its people, the Sindhis, have lived in this region for centuries, developing a rich cultural heritage and a deeply rooted social identity. Its ancient cities, diverse religious traditions, and long-standing coexistence of Hindu, Muslim and , Sufi, forms a deeply rooted heritage that has survived centuries of political transformations. Yet despite this cultural history, Sindh has endured decades of systematic exclusion within Pakistan. The centralized state has consistently prioritized the political and economic interests of other regions while proactively shrinking representation and civic space in Sindh, leaving Sindhis struggling for meaningful representation, control over their natural resources and protection of their basic rights. The political exclusion of the Sindh people goes hand in hand with a broader human rights crisis that affects not only young women and religious minorities, but also anyone who raises their voice against central authorities. Enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, and extrajudicial killings continue to target activists, human rights defenders, journalists and all voices that depart from the government’s preferred narrative.
Sindh has been a member of the UNPO since 2002, highlighting the Sindhi people’s ongoing struggle for recognition and self-determination on the national and international stage. The Sindhi population has seen its political rights systematically denied, with their demands for greater autonomy, cultural preservation and control over local resources largely ignored.
The region, long rich in natural resources yet plagued by persistent socio-economic inequalities, has seen local communities struggle with poverty, limited access to services, and environmental degradation. Despite Sindh’s wealth, decades of underinvestment and exploitative economic policies have left many families marginalized and economically vulnerable. In recent years, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has further exacerbated these challenges. Rather than delivering meaningful benefits, CPEC projects, including coal power plants, large infrastructure initiatives, and extractive industries, have damaged the environment, seized land, and displaced entire neighborhoods with minimal compensation. For many Sindhis, CPEC represents a development model that prioritizes geopolitical and corporate interests over local welfare. Far from creating economic opportunities, it has deepened precarity, worsened social conditions, and fueled widespread feelings of dispossession among ordinary families.
Within this landscape of political repression, environmental catastrophe and economic exclusion, the devastating problem of child marriage has intensified. As poverty deepens, livelihoods disappear, and communities lose their homes and sources of income, families, especially in rural areas, are increasingly pushed toward harmful coping mechanisms. In this context, the early marriage of girls has become both a symptom and an accelerator of the broader crisis facing Sindh.
Where Political Exclusion and Climate Change Converge: A Deepening Child Rights Crisis in Sindh
Interviews with Sindhi experts reveal child marriage is not an isolated cultural practice; it is a complex crisis shaped by entrenched patriarchy, environmental collapse, extreme poverty and a legal system unable, or unwilling, to protect the most vulnerable. Behind the legal framework lies the daily reality endured by thousands of girls across the province, a reality that rarely makes national headlines despite being one of Pakistan’s most severe and persistent human rights violations.
Sindh province consistently records some of the highest rates of child marriage in Pakistan. National demographic surveys show that nearly one in three girls in the country marries before the age of 18, and Sindh’s rural districts rank among the most affected. In villages across Tharparkar, Jacobabad, Dadu, Kashmore, and similar areas, early marriage is often viewed not as an exception but as an expected social transition for girls. Many families, pushed into extreme economic insecurity, arrange marriages for their daughters soon after puberty, sometimes even before the age of twelve. In the most vulnerable households, the pressures are even more acute. Families unable to provide food, healthcare, or schooling describe early marriage as a way to shift financial responsibility. Others marry their daughters to significantly older men in exchange for money, livestock, or debt relief, practices that experts describe as a form of “indirect selling of daughters.”
The anthropological and social roots of child marriage in Sindh are deeply intertwined with the control exercised over rural and marginalized areas by landed elites, feudal networks, and local authorities. These actors dominate local governance, dictate social norms, and control economic resources, creating a system in which harmful practices like child marriage are normalized and, in many cases, tacitly accepted by families. Within this framework, early marriage is often seen not merely as a cultural custom but as a pragmatic response to extreme poverty, landlessness and social pressures. Families, facing insecurity and limited opportunities, may consent to the marriage of their daughters to secure financial support or maintain social alliances, even when fully aware of the potential harm. These structural dynamics, reinforced over generations, ensure that child marriage persists as a deeply embedded social expectation, particularly in areas marked by extreme poverty.
Exacerbating this entrenched system is the rise of extremist Islamic networks, whose influence spans both rural and urban areas. These groups are deeply embedded in local structures through madrassasa and clerics and they propagate intolerance and targeted persecution, particularly against Hindu and Christian girls. Their presence reinforces cycles of vulnerability and perpetuating conditions in which young women remain disproportionately exposed to child marriage, forced conversions and gender-based violence.
Despite the significant efforts of human rights defenders, local activists, and civil society organizations in Sindh, child marriage remains a persistent and deeply entrenched phenomenon. A second anthropological factor sustaining this crisis is the state itself: successive Pakistani governments have failed to provide effective protection, enforce existing laws, or hold perpetrators accountable. This combination of entrenched local traditions and systemic governmental neglect ensures that, despite progressive legislation and grassroots advocacy in Sindh, young girls continue to bear the heaviest burden of one of most pervasive human rights violations.
Instead, beyond human-driven causes, an additional and largely uncontrollable factor hat has further worsened this crisis is the accelerating climate emergency, which has had a direct and devastating impact on child marriage in Sindh. The catastrophic floods of 2010, 2011, 2020, and especially 2022, when one-third of Pakistan was submerged, devastated Sindh’s rural economy. The 2022 floods alone affected millions of people in Sindh, destroying homes, livestock, crops, and entire village infrastructures. Prolonged drought in arid regions such as Tharparkar has compounded the devastation, while seawater intrusion from the Arabian Sea continues to swallow fertile farmland in coastal districts like Badin, Sujawal, Thatta, and parts of Karachi.
With livelihoods collapsing, families face impossible choices. Displaced households lose their only sources of income, agriculture, livestock, and fishing, pushing them into chronic poverty. Girls, already burdened by gender inequality, become the first victims of these compounding crises. Parents who have lost their land and sources of income describe marrying off daughters as a “survival strategy,” either to reduce the number of dependents or to obtain financial support from the groom’s family. Early marriage thus becomes a coping mechanism in the face of desperation: a harmful practice normalized not just out of cultural conviction but out of sheer necessity.
Climate-induced displacement has also increased girls’ exposure to trafficking, forced migration, and gender-based violence. Overcrowded temporary shelters (in the districts of Badin and Thatta) where tens of thousands of families sought refuge after major floods, have been identified by UNPO, UNHCR and local NGOs as hotspots for harassment, assault, and exploitation. In these unsafe environments, early marriage is often perceived by families as a way to “protect” girls from sexual violence, even though it exposes them to lifelong harm and entrenches cycles of poverty and abuse.
A Broken Legal Framework: When Laws Fail to Protect the Most Vulnerable
Pakistan’s legal framework on child marriage is fragmented, outdated, and largely ineffective, particularly in marginalized provinces such as Sindh. At the federal level, the Child Marriage Restraint Act (CMRA) of 1929 criminalizes marriage under 18 for boys and 16 for girls, but its penalties are minimal, one month of imprisonment and a fine of 1,000 rupees (11 dollar) and enforcement has historically been weak. In 2025, Islamabad passed a revised Child Marriage Restraint Act, raising the minimum age to 18 for both genders in the capital, but this reform applies only to Islamabad, leaving provinces responsible for their own legislation and enforcement.
Sindh, while formally part of Pakistan, has provincial autonomy under the 18th Amendment, allowing it to legislate on family and marriage laws. In 2014, Sindh became the first province in Pakistan to adopt a genuinely progressive law, Sindh Child Marriage Restraint Act, setting the minimum marriage age at 18 for both girls and boys, an achievement made possible through sustained advocacy by Sindhi legislators, civil society groups, and women’s rights activists. Yet even this landmark reform has struggled to bring meaningful protection. On paper, Sindh has the strongest legal protections against child marriage in the country. In practice, however, enforcement is systematically weak due to the structure of local power.
In addition to weak legislative measures, deep-seated social norms, entrenched poverty, political pressure from religious parties and the reluctance of police and courts to act against influential clerics have rendered the law mostly ineffective. Religious groups continue to denounce such legislation as “un-Islamic,” blocking further reforms and intimidating provincial authorities.
Within this broken legal landscape, the burden of violation falls overwhelmingly on young girls, whose rights, safety and futures are systematically undermined.
Forced Conversions: The Other Face of Gendered Oppression in Sindh
Another critical dimension of the child-marriage crisis in Sindh is the widespread phenomenon of forced conversions. The province hosts Pakistan’s largest Hindu population and a smaller but notable Christian minority, both proportionally far more present here than elsewhere in the country. This demographic reality places minority girls at heightened risk of abduction, coercion, and forced religious conversion and marriage. Human rights organizations, including the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), report that hundreds of such cases occur annually, though the true scale is likely far higher due to chronic underreporting and official denial.
Forced conversions follow a disturbingly consistent pattern. Girls, most of them minors, are kidnapped by local men or criminal networks and taken to madrassas notorious for facilitating these abuses. Clerics then swiftly “validate” both conversion and marriage, often issuing certificates within hours. These institutions are seldom scrutinized; numerous investigations have highlighted protection from influential religious, political, and security actors, creating near-total impunity. Sindhi experts consulted alongside the World Sindhi Congress point to a long-standing nexus between extremist religious networks, feudal elites, and elements of the security apparatus that enables these crimes.
At the federal level, Islamabad’s stance remains contradictory. While international pressure, particularly from UN mechanisms and EU institutions, has forced the government to acknowledge the problem, meaningful reform is consistently blocked. The 2021 federal bill against forced conversions collapsed under opposition from religious parties claiming that banning conversions under 18 violated sharia. Similar efforts in the Sindh Assembly have been repeatedly stalled due to pressure from Islamist groups, political interests, and the security establishment’s reluctance to confront radical religious actors.
As a result, minority girls remain trapped in a cycle of violence that is not only tolerated but structurally enabled. Forced conversions are not isolated criminal incidents; they stem from institutional inaction, discriminatory state practices, and entrenched extremist influence that collectively strip Sindhi Hindu and Christian girls of their childhood, identity, and fundamental rights.
Conclusion: The Urgent Need for Protection, Accountability, and International Support
The realities of child marriage and forced conversions in Sindh are not isolated phenomena, they are the direct outcome of systemic marginalization, state complicity, and environmental collapse. Laws exist but are not enforced; institutions claim neutrality but act with bias; families seek protection but are met with silence. In this climate, the work of civil society and international advocacy becomes not only valuable but essential.
Local organizations and human rights defenders continue to raise awareness, organize protests, and support victims, but their impact is severely restricted by the power of extremist networks and the reluctance of state institutions to intervene. International advocacy, conducted through UNPO, the World Sindhi Congress and global human rights bodies, remains one of the few avenues capable of pressuring the Pakistani state into acknowledging and addressing these abuses.
Real change requires the full implementation of existing laws, economic investment that lifts families out of poverty and an unwavering commitment to protect minority and unrepresented communities. Above all, it requires placing the dignity, safety and rights of girls at the center of policy and public life. Until this happens, the young girls of Sindh will continue to face one of the most severe and overlooked human rights crises in South Asia.
UNPO works to ensure that the voices and rights of the Sindhi people are represented on the international stage, advocating for the enforcement of existing laws and urging Islamabad to improve the living conditions of a population long excluded, persecuted, and silenced where young girls continue to pay the highest price.