Child marriage is an indefensible practice that is, quite unfortunately, still perpetuated to this day in our nation, and the lack of any visible progress to end this incredibly unsettling phenomenon is a failure of governments both past and present.
According to the 2019 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, 51% of girls in Bangladesh are married off before their 18th birthday, and 15% are married off before the age of 15. The most commonly cited reason behind parents opting to marry off their young daughters is financial problems, which makes sense as the practice seems especially concentrated in marginalized communities where poverty and lack of awareness are rife.
To that end, the recent Prothom Alo report which shed light on more than 100 child marriages taking place in one specific union of Bhola Sadar upazila comes off as shocking and, at the same time, entirely unsurprising. The rural population of Bangladesh is often the subject of misinformation and, together with the financial difficulties they face, fail to do what is best for the well-being of their child, and such situations are perpetuated by unscrupulous kazis who don’t find anything reprehensible about child marriages as was the case in the Bhola union.
Child marriage is, then, perpetuated by broken child safety policies and the fact that there are swathes of Bangladesh which are completely cut off from any semblance of our economic development.