CPCJ Counts 54 Early-or-Forced Marriages in the 2025 Cycle — The First Year the Caseload Carries Its Own Typology After the March 2025 Sub-18 Wedding Ban

Portugal's Comissões de Proteção de Crianças e Jovens (CPCJ) catalogued 54 cases of early or forced marriage in 2025, the first year the protection network has tracked the category as its own typology. The figure surfaced at the network's annual report presentation in Lisbon on Wednesday and was confirmed by the Comissão Nacional de Promoção dos Direitos e Proteção das Crianças e Jovens (CNPDPCJ).

The typology was created after the Assembleia da República raised the minimum marriage age to 18 in March 2025, removing the prior carve-out that had let 16- and 17-year-olds marry with parental consent. The legal change converted what had been a flagged-but-uncategorised situation into a specific intervention ground under the child-protection law, and the 54 cases are the first batch the commissions could log under that heading.

Where the cases were flagged

The CPCJ press materials placed the bulk of the 2025 caseload in the Alentejo and Algarve regions, the same southern strip where the Associação para o Planeamento da Família and the Comissão para a Cidadania e Igualdade de Género have run targeted prevention work since 2018. Year-on-year comparison is not yet possible because no equivalent typology existed in the 2024 annual report.

Historical context comes from the Livro Branco issued by the CIG in November 2024, which catalogued 836 child, early, or forced-marriage cases between 2015 and 2023 — 126 of them involving minors in the 10-to-14 age band. The 2025 number is therefore not a sudden surge but the first year those situations show up inside the CPCJ counter itself, where they can trigger the full menu of protection orders and follow-up support.

The wider 2025 caseload

The 54 marriages sit inside a network caseload that the CPCJ totalled at roughly 94,743 active processes for 2025, up 21% on the 2021 baseline. Signalled situations of danger — the category that triggers a case opening — reached 62,204, a 6.4% year-on-year increase. The marriage typology will move into the standard quarterly bulletin from the first quarter of 2026 onward.

What the new typology actually does

The CPCJ workflow gives the local commission three options once a case is signalled: a voluntary protection plan agreed with the family, an institutional placement order issued by the Public Ministry, or a referral up to the family court. For early-marriage situations the law now also folds in Article 154-B of the Penal Code, which criminalises forced marriage with a sentence of one to five years, with the CPCJ acting as the upstream detection layer that hands cases to the criminal-investigation police.

For foreign-born residents the practical effect is that any wedding involving a sub-18 partner — including ceremonies performed abroad and then registered at the Conservatória dos Registos Centrais — is now an automatic CPCJ entry point, with the registo official obliged to flag the file. The pre-2025 carve-out that recognised consular weddings under the home-country age threshold is closed.

The full 2025 annual report is available on the CNPDPCJ portal at cnpdpcj.gov.pt and will form the baseline for the multi-year series the commission will now publish on the forced-marriage line.