Claim: A video on social media shows a young girl in Pakistan being forcefully married to a 40 year old man.
Fact: The claim is false as the video is actually from Bangladesh. Since 2023, the video has been shared in different contexts, ranging from forced marriage to forced divorce and workplace disputes.
On 24 January 2026, a user on X (formerly Twitter) posted a video with the caption:
“A young girl in Pakistan was FORCED to sign a marriage contract with a FORTY year old MAN. Should America BAN Islamic Sharia Law in all 50 states immediately?!”
The video appears to show a young woman being forcefully grabbed and pressured by a small group of men and one woman to sign a document.
This is not the first time the video has circulated online. In 2024, it was shared with similar claims of forced conversion, which Soch Fact Check subsequently debunked.
Fact or Fiction?
To investigate, Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse image search on the video’s keyframes. The results showed posts from 2023 and 2024 with different contexts associated with the video.
Claim linked to forced religious marriage:
In September 2024, the video was shared alleging that it shows a girl from a religious minority being forcefully converted and then married. The caption reads “Minorities are not safe in #Pakistan! This is the situation of minorities, especially women, who are forced to convert and then forced to marry!”
On 11 September 2023, the video was linked to forced marriage in India and the post’s caption, when translated from Turkish into English, reads:
“In India, they tried to forcibly marry off a girl by choking her!
The child’s struggle to avoid signing the marriage document was reflected like this.”
However, the video has been shared earlier in different contexts and linked to Bangladesh earlier.
Claim linked to multiple context across Bangladesh:
1. Forced Marriage/Divorce:
Taking a lead from the results, we found more posts where the video was linked to Bangladesh in different contexts. On 11 September 2023, the video was shared on X with the claim that it shows the forced marriage of a woman in Bangladesh. The post caption reads:
“This video is from Bangladesh where a young Muslim woman is being forced by her parents to sign a marriage contract with an older man.
Really Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance and choice.”
However, an earlier post from 3 September 2023, claims that the video actually shows a forced divorce rather than a marriage. The Facebook post’s caption in Bangla reads;
“মনের বিরুদ্ধে জোর করে তালাক দিলে সেই তালাক কি হয়?”
Translated [If divorce is forced against the mind, what happens to that divorce?]
The video was also posted on TikTok on 3 September with the claim that it shows an instance of forced divorce.
2. Workplace Theft Dispute:
Further investigation led us to an X post from 11 September 2023 by British-Bangladeshi journalist Dilly Hussain, deputy editor of 5Pillars, a Muslim news site based in the UK, and a columnist for Middle East Eye.
In his post, he clarified that the case is not of a forced marriage or divorce, but rather of stealing at the workplace. The post reads;
“This video which has gone viral in the last 24 hours is NOT of a forced marriage in Bangladesh.
This is an incident of a shop employee who plotted to steal money from her employer, and after she was caught, she refused to sign a confession statement that could’ve led to jail.”
Investigative journalist Sulaiman Ahmad also posted on X about the same claim on 11 September. He rebutted the claim saying that the incident is actually from Bangladesh and shows a girl refusing to sign a confession document after stealing from her employee.
Another user stated that the incident was a workplace dispute and shared an image of what appears to be a marriage document (nikkah nama) from Bangladesh. The user claimed that the document the woman is being made to sign in the video is neither a nikkahnama nor divorce papers.
However, to get more clarity, Soch Fact Check conducted a Google advanced search with the keywords “Bangladesh Nikkah nama” and “”Bangladesh divorce paper”. The image results showed a document that is different from the one appearing in the video being fact-checked. These can be seen below:
We also checked the official website of the Government of Bangladesh, which shows separate forms: “form 1605” for divorce and form 1601 for marriage, known as “Nikkah nama” in Bangladesh, both of which show a very different format. However, the stamp paper in the video is a generalised one showing the common stamp and cannot be associated with the official format of a marriage document or divorce papers. This clarifies that it does not show a case of forced marriage/divorce.
It is noteworthy that the background in the video shows a shop with clothes hanging behind the people. It does not show a court or any magistrate office which further alludes to the fact that the video is likely from a workplace dispute and not related to a forced marriage or divorce.
Virality
The video was shared here, here, and here on X.
It was also posted here, here, and here on Facebook.
Conclusion: The video does not show a young girl being forced to marry an old man in Pakistan. Soch Fact Check verified that the footage is from Bangladesh, although there is not enough reliable evidence to establish whether it depicts a forced marriage/divorce or a workplace dispute.
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Background image in cover photo: