Scourge of child marriage

Child marriage, especially of teenage rural girls, has not received the focus it deserves for quite some time. There are reasons. Over the past few years, with the school-going girls emerging with better results in the SSC exams, some preparing for college admissions, they have been able to make themselves stand out. Few thought that the custom of child marriage could be insidiously present in villages. Also, the stifling environment of the pandemic provided a favourable ground for parents, particularly of poor and low-income families, to get rid of girls considered extra mouths and a burden on such households.
Against this backdrop, the data contained in a recent UNICEF report, released early this month, may make one feel dejected. According to the report, Bangladesh has the highest prevalence of child marriage with 34.5 million among the South Asian countries. In Bangladesh, 51 per cent of young women are married in their childhood, it notes. The report uses data from the Bangladesh 2019 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. As it elaborates on the data, it has the eighth highest prevalence of child marriage in the world. Approximately, 34.5 million women in Bangladesh are married before they turn 18 and over 13 million women are married before they turn 15. A strikingly different picture of girls also exists in Bangladesh. While most of the rural parents start worrying about their daughters as they study at the primary stage, many others are found encouraging these girls to take part in extra-curricular activities. That many teenage and post-teenage girls are groomed in the fields of sport has a lot to do with these liberal parents. Besides parents, teachers at the girls' respective schools also play a dominant role in discovering their students' flair for activities other than textbooks. These talented girl footballers nowadays play in the local and regional soccer tournaments.
Dozens of outstanding girl football players have lately emerged from obscure villages across the country. Many schools, local clubs, social organisations remain engaged in bringing up newer girl players. It's a pointer to the seeds of progress being sown in the villages alongside those of orthodoxies and obscurantism. It's amazing to see rural school girls going to school in groups riding bicycles, a spectacle unthinkable a decade ago. Ironically, this is not the whole picture. Parents are found getting busy in marrying off their teenage girls. It's not that they are against their daughters engaging in sport. What scares them is social stigma.
In the eyes of many social guardians in Bangladesh rural society, girls ought to be married off soon after they are in their teens. These parents remain ever worried about the marriage of their daughters --- in most cases with males much older than the girls. To speak tersely, it's the parents' fear of being ostracised by society because the dictates of tradition encourage most of the child marriages. According to an analysis by the UNICEF, despite progress the number of child brides in Bangladesh is staggering. Millions of these girls are being robbed of their childhood, and denied their fundamental rights. This is unconscionable. In unanimity with the UNICEF, it's time to assert that there is an urgent need to protect girls from child marriage.