Nargise asked around, inquiring where the girls had disappeared to. “I came to know that all of them got married during the COVID-19 lockdown,” she said. “It was surreal.”She expected to be reunited with her girl friends and catch up on 543 days of their lives she had missed. Instead, she was stunned. She was the only girl there.
Nargise Nahar with her parents Abdul Khalek and Roshna Begum outside her home.
“In Bangladesh, it’s a social norm where parents think that the older girls get, they will not get a good groom,” said Das. “Also, if they marry them off at an early age, they get to pay a smaller amount of dowry.” Dowry is another common South Asian practice wherein the bride’s family pays off the groom’s family as part of the marital exchange. The transactional nature of the custom is deeply rooted in male-biased inheritance laws and patriarchy. Fauzia Moslem, the acting president of Bangladesh Mahila Parishad, a rights-based NGO that’s part of the global campaign called Girls Not Brides, added that the fault also lies in the lack of political will to protect girls. “All districts have child marriage prohibition committees,” she said. “But its functions are not adequate. The state is not taking it seriously.”The country’s Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2017, has been criticised in the past for allowing marriages in “special cases”. Moslem said these exceptions have diluted the law. “There is a lot of violence against girls, and these acts are not properly addressed. There is no justice,” she said. “So the guardians think they would rather shift the responsibility of their girls. And that leads to early marriages.”Bangladesh ranks among 10 countries with the highest cases of child marriage in the world.
Now, increasing news reports of disappearing girls have agitated local administrations. Sarkar said the local officials instructed the school to carry out an investigation and figure out where the girls went. “When we reached out to the families, some told us their daughters went to [the capital] Dhaka or elsewhere after their marriages,” he said.In Kurigram itself, at least 50,000 children are estimated to have dropped out due to early marriage and poverty. The local education official in Kurigram told local news outlets that as many as 63 girls in this district became victims of child marriage.
