WUNRN
BANGLADESH - REDUCING CHILD MARRIAGE
THROUGH ONLINE BIRTH RECORDS
Birth
registration data is being made available online in Bangladesh in an effort to
combat child marriages. Still, while a six-year project to furnish birth
certificates to all citizens has been finding success, root causes of early
marriages continue to contribute to rates of child marriage that affect some
66% of rural women.
DHAKA, 3 July 2012 (IRIN) - The Bangladeshi government is
attempting to register birth data online to combat high levels of child
marriage. On 8 June in Bangladesh’s western Khustia District, local media
reported that 15-year-old Iva Parvin was to be married off by parents hiding
her age, but local officials challenged the marriage and demanded proof that
she had reached the legal marrying age of 18. When her parents could not
provide documentation, the marriage was not approved.
“We feel the situation is improving but it is still not acceptable,” said Amy
Delneuville, a child protection specialist at the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
in Bangladesh. “In visits by our staff to the field, we are still finding
unacceptable numbers of girls being married with the approval of the kazi [a
person who conducts the marriage] and parents.”
Everyone should “soon” have a birth certificate. Limited birth registration data is already online, with a full roll-out expected by
June 2013. “Once it is fully online it will be easy to stop child marriage when
parents marry off their daughter hiding her age,” said A K M Saiful Islam
Chowdhury, director of the government's Birth and Death Registration Project,
which is supported by UNICEF.
The government launched a campaign to reach the estimated 90 percent of the
population that did not have birth documentation in 2006. Today, an estimated
114 million of the country’s 150 million inhabitants have birth certificates,
according to officials.
Root causes
The 2007 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey recorded that 66 percent of
women aged 20-24, mainly in rural areas, were married before they were 18 years
old.
Zinnat Afroze, a social development adviser at Plan International, a child
rights NGO working in Bangladesh, said it was impossible to end child marriage
without addressing its root causes.
The Bangladesh National Women Lawyers’ Association noted that almost 90 percent
of girls aged 10-18 have experienced what is known locally as “eve-teasing”,
where boys intercept girls on the street, shout obscenities, tease them and
grab their clothing.
“Parents feel insecure… [they fear the] sexual harassment [of their girls] and
marry off their girl child,” Afroze said. Local human rights groups have reported
girls committing suicide as a result of such harassment.
The dowry is another problem, Afroze said. “Many parents believe that they have
to give high dowry money if they [wait and] do not marry off their girl at
their early age,” she said. The younger the bride, the lower the dowry.
Fighting back
Experts note that birth certificates are only one tool for preventing such
marriages. Since 1982 the Female Secondary School Assistance Programme has used cash
incentives paid to families to keep girls in secondary school and out of
marriage.
Guardians receive a stipend of up to $9 per month, depending on which grade the
girl is in at school, on condition that she attends at least 75 percent of her
classes, and remains unmarried until she completes her exams. Tuition, books
and public exam fees are also covered.
Afroze said some guardians have tried to collect the stipend without sending
the girls to school. “The government stipend programme for female students
should continue, and should be strongly monitored so that the right person gets
it.”