There is a particular cruelty that Bangladesh holds the highest rate of child marriage in all of South Asia. A Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics survey from 2023 reported that 41.6 per cent of young women had married before 18, and 8.2 per cent before the age of 15 - up from 32.4 per cent and 4.7 per cent respectively in 2021. A reversal of that magnitude does not speak the language of custom. It speaks the language of crisis, and the distinction matters enormously.
The policy failure in Bangladesh is particularly instructive because it is not a failure of ignorance - it is a failure of will clothed in legislative language. The Child Marriage Restraint Act of 2017 was presented as a modernising reform. In practice, lawmakers codified a "special provision" that permits courts - at the request of parents or guardians - to authorise marriages of minors in the best interests of the minor, with no lower bound on age specified. The provision is ambiguous and lacks comprehensive guidelines on how to determine the best interest of the child or even a minimum age for marriage with parental consent and judicial authorisation. This is not an oversight. It is an architecture of ambiguity that functions, in practice, as an architecture of permission. The law contradicts its stated aim to prevent child marriage. Instead, it encourages it to happen under this special provision, acting as an obstacle to fulfilling Bangladesh's national and international obligations to end child marriage.
The consequences of this legal tolerance are written onto the bodies and futures of Bangladeshi girls. Child marriage often leads to adolescent pregnancies, which are among the leading causes of death for older adolescent girls due to complications in childbirth. It is strongly linked to intimate partner violence, with 62 per cent of married adolescent girls reporting such abuse in 2024. These are not incidental outcomes. They are predictable results of placing a child inside a social structure that strips her of agency, removes her from education, and inserts her into adult obligations her body and mind are not equipped to bear. The violence is in the structure, not merely in the individuals who enact it.
The conversation Bangladesh urgently needs is not about whether child marriage is cultural or criminal, because the framing is a false dilemma designed to delay. It is criminal. It is also structural. Ending it requires not just the removal of legal loopholes - though the special provision in the 2017 Act must go - but a comprehensive assault on the conditions that make girls economically dispensable in the eyes of families fighting poverty. That means targeted cash transfers, secondary school infrastructure that reaches rural girls, and community accountability mechanisms that make early marriage socially costly rather than socially convenient.
In Bangladesh, the statistical evidence of child marriage is, at its core, a testament to how many people still quietly believe that the lives of poor girls matter less. Until that belief is treated as the policy emergency it is - not as a cultural sensitivity to be navigated - the numbers will continue to rise, and the wound will remain the system itself.
The writer is a researcher and development professional
