Farhana Sheikh

162011044

Increased child marriage in rural areas of Rangur

Introduction

Marriages in which a child under the age of 18 years is involved occur worldwide. Child
marriage has been referred to as early marriage, but these terms are not optimal. Early
marriage does not imply that children are involved, and the term is vague because an early
marriage for one society may be considered late by another. The term child brides glorify the
tradition by portraying an image of joy and celebration. Most of these marriages are arranged
by parents, and girls rarely meet their future husband before the wedding. The girls know that
after the wedding they will move to their husband’s household, become the responsibility of
their in-laws, and might not see their own family or friends for some time.

While the incidence of child marriage has decreased worldwide, it has increased in

Bangladesh. Bangladesh stands fourth in child marriage prevalence, second only to India in
numbers. The three other countries where the child marriage rate is higher than Bangladesh
are backward African countries. In the rural area of Bangladesh 58.6% of women got married
before the age of 18. Mostly, the poor and uneducated family got involved into child
marriage. Child marriage also influences by religion and cultural factors.

Research Objective: To determine the underlying reasons of increase in early age marriage
and its bad consequences after marriage life and its possible effective solutions for the
occurring areas to overcome it.

Research Question

1. What is the condition of child marriage in the rural area of Bangladesh?

2. What are the major underlying reasons of early marriage?
3. What are the bad consequences happened after getting married?
4. What are the possible effective solutions of this problem?

Literature Review
Child marriage, or the marriage of an individual under age 18, affects approximately 900
million individuals every year, of which 720 million are girls (Mutyaba 2011).  Declines in
the practice of child marriage under age 15 have been seen in the last 30 years, but this
change has been inadequate, evidenced by the continued high prevalence of child marriage
under age 18 in South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.  Girls are married under age for a
variety of reasons, including the financial need of the girls’ families, cultural desires to
preserve sexual purity for marriage, religious beliefs, and external conflict. Additionally, lack
of access to education, rural residence, unequal treatment of girls, and conditions of poverty
are associated with the practice of child marriage.

Bangladesh still has some of the highest rates of child marriage worldwide. More than half of
all girls are married before the legal age of 18. Girls who get married are often under pressure
to give birth to a child early into marriage (UNFPA, 2019).

Rangpur and Khulna had more than four times higher odds of child marriage  than Sylhet
(4.57 and 4.11 times, respectively). Barisal and Rajshahi had more than three times higher
odds of child marriage than Sylhet (3.70 and 3.48 times, respectively). Chittagong and Dhaka
had about two times odds of child marriage than Sylhet (1.98 and 2.67 times, respectively),
even after controlling for selected socio-demographic, economic and cultural characteristics.
Respondent's education, employment status, husband's education and wealth index were
inversely associated with the prevalence of child marriage (Islam, Haque & Hossain, 2016). 

Above all the information the main study is to differentiate between the Rangpur area and
other region of Bangladesh. The survey is based on knowing the knowledge gap between
increasing child marriage only in Rangpur area not in other areas.

Methodology
Study area

One of the major cities in Bangladesh is Rangpur. Also here in Rangpur child marriage rate is
also very high. To conduct the study, mainly four main areas need to be covered such as
Badarganj, Mithapukur, Gangachara, Kaunia. These places covers most of the Rangpur area
as well as these places are also known as child marriage area and it’s increasing day by day.
So, if I collect data from these places, the data will come out more clearly. So, I will be
selecting these location to conduct the research. The next step will be data collection.
 Data collection

As the population of Rangpur is 15,000,000, the sample size would be 384 .I will be doing
mixed research method for conducting the research. Both qualitative and quantitative method.
These ideas has both discussion part and answering yes/no questions. These questions will be
providing the current situation of child marriage of why it’s increasing day by day in his
specific district also the bad consequences of marriage will come out as well as the reasons
also. Now what type of discussions will be doing is given below:

 Their opinion of child marriage of victims.

 Do the families think that they are breaking the law by supporting the child marriage
and also giving mental pressure to their children?
 Will be asking the bad consequences happened of marriage.
 The number of the victims of this area.
 The solutions of child marriage who doesn’t support child marriage.

Conceptual Framework

Reasons of Child Marriage Outcome Actions Needed

Increasing day
 Health Issue.
Trends by day  Awareness among
 Lack of freedom
the people of the
 No education.
society.
 Pregnancy
 Should take
Culture Problem.
necessary steps of
 Household work
Lack of government.
pressure.
education  Increase child
 Giving birth
education.
Dowry immediately
 Support the victims.
after marriage.
 Let the rural
 No value in the
families know about
society.
the child marriage.
The conceptual framework shows that the reasons behind increasing child marriage are trends
which are being followed from the decades of decades and it is very hard to adopt new
culture among those rural people. There are some another culture which is dowry, the groom
family wants dowry otherwise they won’t marry that child. Another one is Lack of education.
This is one of the biggest reason of occurring child marriage. For these reasons there are
happening bad consequences among the children. Such as health issues, lack of freedom, no
education, pregnancy problem, household work pressure, giving birth immediately, no value
in the society. To stop child marriage some actions should be highly needed. They are
awareness among the society, our government should tale necessary steps against this,
increased child education, support the victims, let the rural families know about the child
marriage.

Work plan

References

Mutyaba, R. (2011). Early Marriage: A Violation of Girls' Fundamental Human Rights in Africa. The
International Journal Of Children's Rights, 19(2), 339-355.

Child marriage. (2019). Retrieved 14 December 2019, from

https://bangladesh.unfpa.org/en/topics/child-marriage-2.

Islam, M., Haque, M., & Hossain, M. (2016). REGIONAL VARIATIONS IN CHILD MARRIAGE
IN BANGLADESH. Journal of Biosocial Science, 48(5), 694-708.