“Before the house is swept away you should get her married,” a neighbor said to Khushi’s mother. Khushi (not her real name) had recently left school because her family could not afford to pay for school costs. Her parents arranged a marriage and Khushi married at age 13 and went to live with her in-laws.
When Human Rights Watch interviewed Khushi in late 2014, she was 16 years old. She and her husband and their one and half year old son were now living with her parents because Khushi’s in-laws’ house and land had been destroyed by river erosion. Khushi had found marriage difficult. “I was very young so I didn’t have a lot of patience,” she said. “Sometimes I wouldn’t let my husband near me and we would fight. And I had all kinds of problems in my body when I was pregnant.”
At this point, her main worry is losing their home. They expected the land belonging to Khushi’s parents to also be swept away by erosion in the next year or two. “I don’t know where god is going to take us,” Khushi said. “We’ll have to go there.”
More girls under the age of 15 get married in Bangladesh than in any other country in the world – a total of 29 percent. By age 18, when they should be graduating from high school, 65 percent of Bangladeshi girls are married.
Poor girls in Bangladesh face a perfect storm: lack of access to education, poverty, and social pressures, all of which drive child marriage. Poor families often can’t afford the costs of education--which include exam fees, stationery and other expenses even in primary school where tuition fees are waived—and see girls as ready for marriage once they’ve left school.
Sexual harassment
Dowry traditions encourage child marriage by setting lower dowry for younger brides, while natural disasters push families further into poverty and sometimes directly prompt child marriage, as in Khushi’s case. Many girls face sexual harassment in their communities and even threats of kidnapping; parents, finding no help from police, see marriage as a way to protect girls.
Several girls, in different parts of the country, used the exact same words to describe to Human Rights Watch how child marriage had affected them. “My life is destroyed,” they said.
Tragically, research supports that view. Girls who marry early are unlikely to stay in school, and many children in Bangladesh leave education before secondary school. Girls face serious health risks – including death – as a result of early pregnancy, risks which also affect their children. They are more likely to suffer domestic violence and abuse. Some of the most heart breaking stories documented in a new Human Rights Watch report about child marriage in Bangladesh are those of girls who were abandoned by their husbands and begged to be taken back even after suffering horrific abuse, simply because they had nowhere else to go.
The government of Bangladesh can and should do more to end child marriage. In addition to being the right thing to do, it’s also legally required, under several international conventions Bangladesh signed up to including on upholding children’s rights and preventing discrimination against women. In 2014, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina pledged to end child marriage before the age of 15 by 2021, and to by that date reduce by one-third marriages between the ages of 15 and 18. She promised to strengthen the law that already makes child marriage a crime, and to develop a national action plan on ending all child marriage under the age of 18, a goal she set for 2041. Although these goals even if achieved would see children continue to marry for the next 26 years, at least they seemed to signal welcome attention to the issue by the Bangladesh government.
In the months that followed, however, Sheikh Hasina’s government took a devastating step backwards, proposing to lower the age of marriage for girls from the current 18 to 16.
France and Bangladesh have close ties
Our country is an important donor to Bangladesh: in 2013, France gave more than € 50 million in aid to Bangladesh. This generosity makes Switzerland the 8th largest donor to Bangladesh. France aids Bangladesh in particular with regard to water services and transportation.
By integrating its actions in assistance programs specifically aimed at preventing child marriage and married girls attend, the French Development Agency (Agence française de développement) has the opportunity to help ensure that Bangladesh pledge to end marriage children become a reality.
Even more importantly, President Hollande and his government should take advantage of the close ties between France and Bangladesh to exert political pressure on Bangladesh to do more to end child marriage.
As every day goes by, another generation of Bangladeshi girls are being lost to child marriage. France can play a role in ending this, and it would be shameful not to.
