A review of child rights laws and policies on forced marriage in Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh is a country with Muslim as majority where the society is dominated by its male members, and the position of women and children are subordinated to men. The violence against women and children in a myriad form are everyday news in Bangladesh. Despite the anti-forced marriage laws and policies, child marriage is a common phenomenon of the society. Therefore, to answer the research question as to how effective are the laws in protecting child rights from forced marriage, the research analysed the effectiveness of the existing laws protecting child rights from forced marriage and identified the loopholes in the implementation of those laws. The research was based on qualitative data from different national and international reports or journals, and the methodology of the study included interviews with the 14 respondents to understand the implementation and loopholes of law against child forced marriage. The findings of the study supported that although laws and policies have an important role in reducing child marriage, the more vital roles were played by other social, cultural, and religious factors that encourage families to perform child marriage. In conclusion, the current laws are not effective enough to protect children from the forced marriage as the children's agreement into marriage is likely based on force. In order to effectively implement the laws and policies, recommendations including recognition of child forced marriage as a violation of human rights, reduction of organizational fraudulent practices, specific authority setup for legitimating marriages, incentives to different actors, and withdrawal of reservation to the international instruments are offered to address the child marriage problem associated with the factors contributing to such practices.