Stop plan to lower marriage age to 16, HRW urges govt

Human Rights Watch today urged the Bangladesh government to stop its proposal to lower the age of marriage for girls to 16 from 18.

The government is yet to take sufficient steps to end child marriage, in spite of promises to do so, the New York-based rights organisation said in a new report released today.

"The Bangladesh government should follow through vigorously and promptly on the public commitments Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina made to end child marriage," said Heather Barr, senior researcher on women's rights at Human Rights Watch.

"The first step should be to back away immediately from the proposal to lower the age of marriage for girls to 16," Barr said.

After her July 2014 pledge to end child marriage by 2041, the Bangladesh prime minister attempted to lower the age of marriage for girls from 18 to 16 years old, raising serious doubts about her commitment, the report claimed.

Bangladesh has the highest rate of child marriage of girls under the age of 15 in the world, with 29 percent of girls in Bangladesh married before age 15, it said quoting a UNICEF study.

The report said two percent of girls in Bangladesh are married before age 11.

Successive inaction by the central government and complicities by local officials allows child marriage, including of very young girls, to continue unchecked, while Bangladesh's high vulnerability to natural disasters puts more girls at risk as their families are pushed into the poverty that helps drive decisions to have girls married, the HRW said.

"Child marriage is an epidemic in Bangladesh, and only worsens with natural disasters," said Barr.

"The Bangladesh government has said some of the right things, but its proposal to lower the age of marriage for girls sends the opposite message. The government should act before another generation of girls is lost."

The 134-page report, "Marry Before Your House is Swept Away: Child Marriage in Bangladesh," is based on more than a hundred interviews conducted across the country, most of them with married girls, some as young as age 10.

It documents the factors driving child marriage in Bangladesh – including poverty, natural disasters, lack of access to education, social pressure, harassment, and dowry.

Human Rights Watch also details the damage that child marriage does to the lives of girls and their families in Bangladesh, including the discontinuation of secondary education, serious health consequences including death as a result of early pregnancy, abandonment, and domestic violence from spouses and in-laws.

Child marriage has been illegal in Bangladesh since 1929, and the minimum age of marriage has been set at 18 for women and 21 for men since the 1980s.

In spite of this, Bangladesh has the fourth-highest rate in the world of child marriage before age 18, after Niger, the Central African Republic, and Chad. Sixty-five percent of girls in Bangladesh marry before age 18, the report said.

The government's failure to enforce the existing law against child marriage and address the factors that contribute to it means that child marriage is a frequent coping mechanism for poor families – parents, who are unable to feed their children, or pay for their education costs, may seek a husband for their daughters simply so that the girls can eat; poor girls lack access to education because their families cannot afford fees for exams, uniforms, stationery, and other associated costs even when education is "free"; girls who leave school are often married by their parents; sexual harassment of unmarried girls – and failure by police to stem this harassment – also helps prompt child marriage.

Social pressures and traditions, including the widespread practice of paying dowry, and lower dowries for younger girls, make child marriage not only accepted, but expected in some communities.

Another finding of the report is the role natural disasters play in child marriage.

Bangladesh is among the countries in the world most affected by natural disasters and climate change; many families are pushed by disasters into deepening poverty, which increases the risk that their daughters will be married as children.

Families described feeling under pressure to arrange marriages quickly for their young daughters in the wake of a disaster, or in the anticipation of one. This was particularly common among families who faced losing their home and land through the gradual destruction caused by river erosion, the report says.

The Bangladesh government is failing to take effective action against child marriage. In 2014, at the international "Girl Summit" held in London, United Kingdom, Bangladesh's prime minister vowed to end child marriage. She outlined a series of steps to do so, including reform of the law and development of a national plan of action by the end of 2014. Neither of these steps has been achieved. Worse yet, the Bangladesh government has taken a step in the wrong direction by proposing to lower the minimum age of marriage for girls from 18 to 16 years old, it added.

Many local government officials also fail girls at risk. Awareness is growing that marriage of girls under age 18 is illegal under Bangladeshi law. But this awareness is fatally undermined by widespread complicity by local government officials in facilitating child marriages.

Interviewees consistently described local government officials issuing forged birth certificates showing girls' ages as over 18, in return for bribes of as little as US$1.30. Even when marriages are prevented by local officials, as they sometimes are, families find it easy to hold the marriage in a different jurisdiction, it said.

In some other ways, Bangladesh has been cited as a development success story, including in the area of women's rights. The United Nations cited Bangladesh's "impressive" poverty reduction from 56.7 percent in 1991-1992 to 31.5 percent in 2010. Bangladesh has achieved gender parity in primary and secondary school enrolment. Maternal mortality declined by 40 percent between 2001 and 2010. Bangladesh's success in achieving some development goals begs the question of why the country's rate of child marriage remains so high, among the worst in the world.

As a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Bangladesh has international obligations to protect the rights of girls and women, including the right to be free from discrimination, to the highest attainable standard of health, to education, to free and full consent to marriage, to choose one's spouse, and to be free from physical, mental, and sexual violence. Human Rights Watch found that child marriage in Bangladesh can result in the inadequate fulfilment and protection of these rights.

The government has taken important strides in facilitating access to education by banning primary level school fees. But other costs associated with attending school mean that education, especially at the secondary level, remains out of reach for too many children, and for girls in Bangladesh the consequence can often be child marriage. Government agencies providing assistance to families in poverty or affected by disasters should be better harnessed to prevent child marriage. Access to information about reproductive health and to contraceptive supplies is out of reach for many of the girls who need it most. Girls facing violence and abuse we interviewed often had nowhere to turn for help. Bangladesh's law on child marriage needs to be reformed, but even more importantly, it needs to be fully enforced, the report includes.

"The Bangladesh government's inaction on child marriage is causing devastating harm to one of the country's greatest assets – its young women," said Barr.

"The government – and its donors – should do more to keep girls in school, assist girls at risk of child marriage, fight sexual harassment, and provide access to reproductive health information and contraceptive supplies. Most importantly, the government should enforce its own law against child marriage."