Seventeen-year-old Rupa asked us to wait in the courtyard before her interview.
Her mother set up the chairs as we waited, while Rupa fed her six-month-old son inside the room. She was visiting her father’s house at the time because she had a doctor’s appointment.
Ever since she gave birth to her son, she has been suffering from severe menstrual cramps and low blood pressure. Her son had also been falling ill very frequently; therefore visiting the doctor had become a regular practice for the adolescent mother and her son. Rupa was one of the many child brides we interviewed for our research on adolescent girls’ vulnerabilities and transitions during Covid-19.
Rupa’s parents did not wait long to marry her off once the schools were closed due to the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown. She was married off in July 2020, when she was studying in class nine. To make matters worse, she was forced to conceive right after her marriage.
Her mother thought that if a girl does not have children right after getting married, she would get involved in extra marital affairs. When we asked her about her study plans, as the schools had just opened at the time of the interview, Rupa said that her husband wanted her to sit for the SSC examination next year but she feared that her mother-in-law would not allow it as she was expected to look after her son.
Then we met Lata. She was just 15 years old at the time. Her hands were covered in mehendi, and we learned that she had gotten married just the day before.
She was in class five when the schools closed and hasn’t gone back since. Her education stopped right after the schools were closed. She would help her mother with household chores and play with her friends in the afternoon.
In the meantime, she got romantically involved with a boy in her area. When the word spread, her parents were furious and horrified. To protect their reputation from further ruin, her parents resorted to marrying her off to her cousin who worked at a garment factory in a different city.
When we asked her what her future plans were, she said it is now up to her husband. As we were walking back to our car, one of her play mates caught up to us and said, “that girl (Lata) was playing hide and seek even the day before her wedding.”
There are many such stories across the country. Bangladesh went into a nationwide lockdown with one of the highest rates of child marriage worldwide, where 51% of young women get married before turning 18. While many other countries were worried about learning loss, we were worried about the increasing number of young girls becoming vulnerable to higher health risks, early pregnancies, and domestic violence as a result of child marriage.
In The Global Girlhood Report, Save the Children estimated that in 2020, an additional 500,000 girls were at risk of becoming child brides and up to one million more girls would become pregnant around the world. The report also estimated that in South Asia, 191,200 more girls would be vulnerable to child marriage in 2020 and 138,000 more girls were at risk of becoming pregnant. In March 2021, Unicef had already predicted that the pandemic would push up to 10 million more girls into becoming child brides over the next decade.
Fast forwarding to September 2021, schools re-opened and our worst fear started to come true. Each day, students talked about their female classmates who did not show up at school, with the news echoing the story about thousands of incidents of child marriages.
A report shared by the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education’s Monitoring and Evaluation wing on August 15 mentioning a shocking 47,414 child marriage incidents during the pandemic period, has left us all stunned.
But, weren’t we warned about this all along?
Now the question is, how do we respond to this? How do we bring Rupa and Lata back to school? It is high time for education to be inclusive and accessible for the child brides who are still harbouring their dreams of continuing their education, especially for those who have become mothers. Their needs and challenges will not be the same as regular school-going adolescents.
One of the biggest challenges is going to be negotiating with the husbands and in-laws so that their education continues. Another challenge would be finding child brides like Lata who are migrating to a different city with her husband. Finally, who will look after the new-born babies while they are in school?
Addressing these challenges requires collective action where the GO-NGOs act together for the best interests of these girls before a generation pays a lifelong price of the pandemic.
Nuha Annoor Pabony is Research Associate, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), Brac University. Email: [email protected].
