An article about child marriage

Here is the full text of a very interesting article one of our students (Zahida Ishrat Khan) wrote about child marriage. The original can be found here. I thought it was very well-written.

It's a very interesting topic - we don't see much of this at AUW (although some of our students are married) but as you can see in the 2nd paragraph, a large percentage of women in Bangladesh are forced to marry before they are 18. While arranged marriage rates are dropping somewhat, it is still a huge problem for women's equality and education.

Nuptial Nightmare - Child Marriage in Bangladesh
by Zahida Ishrat Khan

“It does not matter whether I am happy or not. I am married, and therefore, I have to suffer,” says 16-year-old Rani.

Rani is a child bride. Her story is common in Bangladesh, where as many as two-thirds of young girls are compelled to enter marriage at a young age. This practice is not limited to slums and rural villages. According to the United Nations State of the World’s Children, the rate of child marriage in Bangladesh is 64%; it affects 58% of girls in urban areas and 69% in rural areas.

These marriages are generally imposed upon girls without any consideration for their feelings. “If my mother says that I have to marry a man, I have to,” Rani says. “So I agreed to marry [my husband].” Rani was 14 years old on her wedding day.

Rosy Parvin, a unit organizer of a project run by UNICEF in Bangladesh says that Bangladeshi girls “do not have any right to talk about themselves.”

“I could not go against my mother’s will,” says Rani. “So I married him without thinking of other options.”

Mominul Islam of the Khulshi Police Station in Chittagong has experience dealing with child marriage. “Bangladesh is a conservative country,” he says. “Here, parents want their daughters to marry early. They are afraid that their daughters might run away with another boy and bring great shame to the family. So they make their daughters marry at a very young age before they understand what love is.”

Rani’s mother, Baby, had another reason to arrange an early marriage. Baby says that she married off her daughter early to reduce her family’s living expenses.

“Rani’s father did not have a job and he was not able to afford the expenses for our whole family,” says Baby. Now, Baby is a single mother living in a slum with her daughter and son. When her husband left her, she had to look after her entire family. To get by, she works as a maid in the homes of wealthier people.

But the money was never enough to support Baby’s whole family. So she decided to marry her daughter to somebody else to lessen the number of mouths to feed.

Culture is another factor that drives parents to force their children into marriage. Girls and their families are subject to gossip if the girl does not marry as early as possible. “When girls become 15 or 16 and still have not gotten married, people starts to talk ill about her, implying that she is undesirable,” says Rani. “To avoid shame, parents prefer to make their daughters marry early.”

Ironically, parents of young girls often opt to marry them off as soon as possible to protect their children from harm. “I could never concentrate on my work thinking about my daughter,” says Baby. “I always used to become worried about my daughter’s security while she was alone at home when I was at work. In our society it is very hard for a single mother to give security to a maturing daughter.”

Meherunnessa, Baby’s neighbor, used to eschew child marriage, but today, she regrets not making her daughter marry early. Her daughter was raped and killed before Meherunnessa could marry her off.

“My daughter was only 12 years old. Her father and I were at work. My daughter and son were at home alone. My daughter was doing chores at home when my son went out to bring water for my daughter because she wanted to pray after taking a shower,” says Meherunnessa with teary eyes and cracking voice. “In this time, a boy came into our home and killed my daughter after raping her. My daughter was tortured brutally. She was stabbed several times with a sharp blade. She died because of excessive bleeding. What was my daughter’s fault? She was my little innocent daughter. All of this happened in the space of an hour.”

“If a father has a beautiful daughter, he will be worried about his daughter until the daughter gets married,” says Anam Ahmed, Deputy Station Commander of the Khulshi Police Station in Chittagong. “This is true for both educated and uneducated people.”

Meherunnessa now believes that early marriage is justified. “It is not safe in our locality to keep girls older than 10-12 years safely,” she says. “We make the daughters marry early so that they can be safe under their husbands’ protection.”

This practice of child marriage is common despite an explicit ban against the practice. Deputy Station Commander Ahmed explains, “According to the law of Bangladesh, if anyone marries under age of fourteen years, it is considered illegal. If anyone marries between the ages of fourteen to eighteen, then the marriage is considered legal depending on their situation.

“But people who arrange marriage for children are considered as criminals according to our laws,” Ahmed says forcefully
These laws are not enforced properly in Bangladesh. Jasmin Parul Sultana, the executive of Ensure Legal Support for Local Movemental Access (ELMA) says most criminals get away with child marriage. “It is true that we have several laws for children’s protection such as a ban on violence against women and children and against child marriage,” explains Sultana. “However, these laws are not enforced properly in Bangladesh.”

“Proper punishments are not given, and the number of child marriages keeps increasing, unabated,” she says.

Ahmed, the Deputy Station Commander, admits that it is hard to punish the criminals. “The main problem that we face while handling child marriage related cases is that it is so hard to find a single eyewitness,” he says. “No one likes to give evidence concerning child marriage because they don’t want to get involved with long court cases. If anyone like the child’s relatives were to come ahead and give evidence, we would be glad to help the victims, but this rarely happens.”

Numerous cases of abuse have been noted in many instances of child marriage, and it is often perpetrated by parents-in-law as well as husbands. From the very beginning of her marriage, Rani has been living in fear.

“[My parents-in-law] beat me for trivial matters. If they think that the dress I washed is not clean or the food I cooked is not tasty, they beat me,” Rani says, surprisingly nonchalantly. She accepts this treatment as normal. “He beats me not only with his hand, but he uses his belt to beat me. He used to say, ‘No matter how much you cry or ask for help from others, I will not stop beating you’.”

With few options, the suicide rate for child brides is exceedingly high. According to a recent report, 51 young brides in Bangladesh committed suicide due to mistreatment by their parents-in-law in just one month in 2004.

Rani has attempted suicide. “Once, I was so tired of his beating. I felt so desperate. I couldn’t take it anymore,” she says. “I wanted to give away my life. I tried to commit suicide by hanging myself.”

Although aware of Rani’s intention to end her life, her in-laws did not try to stop her. According to Rani, her in-laws were actually happy when they learned that Rani was going to hang herself. “I went inside my room and was preparing to hang myself. I screamed, ‘I am going to take away my life!’ My mother-in-law and my husband were relaxing outside the room,” Rani recalls. “They were listening to what I was saying but they did not try to save me, as I was a burden to them.”

The neighbors informed Rani’s mother and brother of the commotion. “Then my brother kicked open the door,” Rani says. “At that time, I had already hanged myself. My mother lost her senses when she saw me hanging from a rope. My brother took me on his lap and got me down from the rope. Then my brother took me to the hospital.”

“I wish I had been successful that day,” mutters Rani.

More often than suicide, early pregnancy kills numerous young brides in Bangladesh. Dr. Sohania Akter Billah, Assistant Gynecologist at the Chittagong Medical College, says many brides are too small and frail to bear a child. “The female body is not matured enough to give birth to a child before the age of 18,” she explains. “If a girl becomes pregnant and has a child too early, she is prone to hemorrhaging that could cause death.”

“In addition, those women face difficulties while delivering babies because their pelvic bone is not large enough to get the baby’s head passed through it,” explains Billah. “So the baby gets stuck in the middle and leads to death of either or both the mother and the child.”

Despite all of their sufferings, victims of child marriage don’t complain much about getting married so early or being tortured by their in-laws. They accept it as their fate. Often, they are too concerned about being thrown out of their husband’s home to complain.

While being interviewed, Rani suddenly revealed her fears about being cast out of her home. “Please do not let my husband know that I am giving any kind of statement that goes against him or his family,” she said. “He will kick me out of his house!”

Unfortunately, in spite of all the sacrifices they make, many of the victims ultimately get abandoned or thrown away by their husbands. Parul of ELMA speaks from her experience working on behalf of these girls: “I have seen so many girls who have been victims that were married at very early age. After having three, four children, their husbands left them and married other women, maybe to another girl child.”

“As they do not have a marriage certificate, the girls cannot claim any legal compensation from their husbands,” says Parul. “They cannot go back to their parents’ home either because their parents are too poor to afford their daughters along with their grandchildren. These girls then live miserable lives. This becomes the fate of most of the victims of child marriage in our country.”

The lack of initiatives to help these child brides means each year more and more girls are compelled by their parents to marry at a young age. But after marriage, these girls are left alone to suffer. If this situation continues, girls like Rani will have to keep suffering alone with no hope for a better future.

“‘I would rather kill you than love you,’ my husband says to me,” says Rani. “Still, I stay with him because I don’t have any other option.