A nine year old Pakistani British girl was saved by charity workers recently days after her parents told her she had to go to Pakistan to get married.

The charity, Karma Nirvana, revealed to the British Telegraph that 60 such children were saved in recent years. Many more were not saved and were sent to Pakistan to get married, often to a cousin.

Jasvinder Sanghera, director of Karma Nirvana, said that the charity helps four young children on average each month. “The youngest child we have dealt with was nine years old,” she said. “The girl told her teacher she was going to be forced to marry someone and initially she was not believed.”

“Ultimately, with the help of the Forced Marriage Unit [a government bureau], she was dealt with through child protection procedures. She was assessed and, thankfully, taken into foster care.”

The Forced Marriage Unit saved 58 children from getting married with someone they knew nor loved. This year the youngest victim was 13 years old, several were younger than 16.

Ms Sanghera founded the charity because she felt forced to flee home when she was 15 years old. Her parents too promised her to a (much) older men, in Pakistan, but she refused and left.

“You don’t just get forced into a marriage at 16 or 17; this is happening to very young children. We certainly have had cases of minors being sexually abused,” she said. “If you are forced into marriage as a minor you will be multiple-raped, because as a child you are legally unable to give consent.”

Sadly however, “we have no idea how many children under 16 are at risk, and this is compounded by a reluctance of schools to engage with the issue. Many schools shy away due to supposed cultural sensitivities.”

She went on: “There will be children sitting in our classrooms this week who have already had identified for them a husband or a wife.”

“These marriages can be prevented by identifying the signs in school or teachers believing pupils when they raise it.”

It seems that schools especially could prevent girls from disappearing at such a young age because their parents force them to get married, but schools are reluctant to act. As usual, it seems, the multiculturalism ideology supersedes basic (human) rights. Let backwards people be backwards, these enlightened teachers seem to think.

The exact scale of the problem is not clear yet. Several thousands of young girls are missing from schools. Some of them, the charity and government fear, may have been taken from their school in order to get married.