There are few issues which are so apparently cut and dried as the age of marriage for women.
It seems self-evident that lowering the age from 18 to 16, as the government proposes to do, is a poor idea, and I hope that the government listens to the legions of experts and critics of the proposed legislation, and that good sense prevails.
The argument that the age of marriage is 16 in many other countries such as the UK (with parental consent) is irrelevant to the case at hand.
The UK does not have a problem with early marriage, Bangladesh does. If the marriage age in the UK were raised to 18 it would make very little difference and impact very few lives.
But in Bangladesh, the proposed change in the law would impact millions and have far-reaching consequences, none of them good.
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At a very basic level there is a lot of data out there to show that the later a woman gets married, the later she will typically have her first child, and that this is correlated to a raft of desirable social outcomes, both for the woman and the child.
The later women get married and give birth, typically, the higher their educational attainment, better their earning prospects over the course of their life-time, and the more likely they are to be happy and healthy throughout their lives. This much is incontrovertible.
If there is one thing we should be encouraging women to do to benefit both themselves and society as a whole, it would be to marry and have children later.
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This would also have a major impact on the country’s population problem. We have done a great job in reducing the average number of children each woman has to just above two, leading to a population growth rate of 1.2% per year. Not bad at all.
The big problem we face, however, continues to be the age at which these births occur. The math is simple. Compare the difference between a country where a woman typically has her first child at age 20 with one where the average age for this is 25.
In this scenario, even if women in both countries bear the same number of children, over a period of 100 years the first country will see five generations and the second only four, leading to massive difference in population growth over the course of the century.
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The average age of first child-birth in Bangladesh is around 18. You do the math. The later first child-birth happens, the better for the woman, the child, and the country.
And of course, the earlier women get married, the earlier that they will have their first child.
There are a lot of social pressures for parents to marry their girls off at a young age, but the government should be helping them resist this pressure, not adding to it.
If the government started an awareness campaign and followed up with tough prosecution for offenders, it could send a stern message and really cut down on the incidence of child marriage.
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Now it is true that many parents wish to marry their girls off early so as to ward of the threat of harassment, rape, or assault, which become serious and pressing concerns as soon as girls reach puberty, if not before.
But in lowering the marriage age, the government is solving the wrong problem, and it should instead focus its resources on protecting girls from this kind of predatory behavior so that they would not have to seek the perceived shelter of marriage to be free of it.
It is precisely because girls in their early teens are considered marriageable that they become the object of this kind of unwelcome attention, and often the harassment is used as a prelude to demand their hand in marriage, with parents having no other recourse but to accede.
This is the kind of abuse that will only get worse if the government lowers the marriage age and continues to do nothing about policing marriage at an even lower age, instead turning a blind eye.
In addition to keeping the marriage age at 18, the government should be cracking down both on under-age marriage and the kind of predatory criminal behavior that makes parents think it is their only recourse. A little government attention to this matter would go a long way.
Of course the real elephant in the room here is the social stigma which is attached to pre-marital sex and pregnancy. One reason parents are so keen to marry their girls off before the age of 18, and many girls themselves wish to marry before then, is the strict societal taboo against pre-marital sex and the disastrous consequences of unmarried pregnancy.
We need to recognise that girls may well wish to be sexually active in their teenage years and that the best way to address this issue is to educate them to have responsible sex and to ensure that the costs of doing so are not so ruinous.
Many people might be appalled at such a thought, but the result of restricting the acceptability of sex to marriage is not fewer girls having sex at a younger age, it is more girls getting married at a younger age.
But if we are not willing to seriously grapple with and come to terms with the issue of teenage girls having sex and the high costs of pre-marital sex in our society, then the government’s proposal is not as outlandish as it seems.