Gains in ending child marriage being undone

In response to a recent question in the national parliament, State Minister for Women and Children Affairs Simeen Hussain (Rimi) made a startling disclosure. She said that over half of the girls in Bangladesh are married off before the age of 18. Citing the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2019, the state minister informed parliament that the rate of child marriage under the age of 15 years was 15.5 per cent, while the rate of child marriage under the age of 18 was 51.4 per cent.
Although these facts are disconcerting, they are far from exceptional or unfamiliar. The issue of child marriage, an age-old social malaise, has resurfaced and worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic, when prolonged school closure led many parents to marry off their young girls. Even in the post-pandemic period, as frequent media reports indicate, it continues to go unabated in rural areas and underdeveloped pockets of the country. This illicit practice appears to be more prevalent in 'char' (islet) areas, which are chronically neglected, isolated, and insulated from the mainstream developmental currents. However, it is proliferating throughout the country. Needless to mention, the victim girls are mostly from underprivileged families who have superstitions due to a lack of enlightenment.
Shockingly, in 2022, 40.9 per cent of girls were married before turning 18, compared to 30.0 per cent in 2018, marking an alarming annual average increase of 2.18 percentage points. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) attributes this surge to the Covid-19 pandemic. Another report from the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education and the United Nations Population Fund found a significant number of girls absent from schools due to early marriages during the pandemic. According to UNICEF statistics, Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child marriages in the world.
A school teacher in Dashmina, Patuakhali, lamented that only a small percentage of girls get to complete secondary education because of the scourge of child marriage. Many girls are known to drop out before completing the Junior School Certificate (JSC) examination. This signifies that parents and guardians do not even wait for their daughters to reach puberty or complete their JSC examination when they're 13 years old, before marrying them off.
Child marriage is both a result of socio-economic backwardness and a cause of it. Some modest gains achieved over the past decades in school enrollment, women's empowerment, and maternity and neonatal survival rates are at risk of being offset if girls become mothers at an age when they should be attending school.
The authorities concerned, therefore, must not stop by merely acknowledging the problem. Urgent measures are needed to eliminate child marriage, because failure to do so could hinder Bangladesh from meeting more than half of the SDG targets, posing a major obstacle to achieving demographic dividends. Moreover, child marriage leads to early pregnancies and associated health risks, depriving women of formal education and hindering their empowerment, and family life. Overall, the country can make no progress if it is again overwhelmed by social maladies that were once thought to be a thing of the past.
Undoubtedly, popular awareness must be created and social pressure built up to end this regressive practice. But primarily, the responsibility lies with the government. Marriage is registered with the government and it has a social welfare department to address social evils, and above all, there is the kazi, or marriage registrar who works under the control of the law ministry. Why are the Kazis not held accountable for registering marriages of minors and their licenses revoked? It appears that in many cases, the Kazis actively participate in the illegal matrimonial contract to realize their petty interest.

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