Reforming marriage practices in Bangladesh

arriage customs in Bangladesh vary by region, complicating national-level efforts to eliminate some of the more harmful practices, such as early marriage and dowry demands, that undermine the status of women. Efforts to reform such a complex and multidimensional institution as marriage must consider economic concerns, social traditions, and social activism. Dowry demands—in addition to exacting an intolerable financial toll on poor households—have in extreme cases led to gruesome crimes, such as murder or assaults on women whose families could not meet escalating dowry costs. Early marriage—often involving girls as young as 10—has been widely recognized in Bangladesh and elsewhere as a human rights offense. The Bangladesh penal code includes many sanctions against harmful marriage practices: The Child Marriage Restraint Act dates back to 1921; dowry payments were first banned in 1980, and sanctions were further strengthened in 1985. Men who ask for dowry at marriage can face fines and imprisonment. Yet because both age at marriage and dowry are related to competitive processes in the marriage market, the brute force approach of legal bans and sanctions has not proven sufficient to curtail these harmful practices. The current legal age at marriage in the country is 18 for women and 21 for men, yet age restrictions are difficult to enforce because Bangladesh lacks an official birth registration system that could be used to verify age. According to the 2004 Demographic and Health Survey, 68 percent of women aged 20–24 were married at age 18 or earlier. Although there are no national estimates to quantify the practice of dowry, one study found that 59 percent of marriages that took place between 1980 and 1991 in four northern villages involved dowry (Amin and Cain 1997). This figure compares to the 53 percent reported from a study conducted among women aged 15–49 in Matlab. The same study reported a much lower figure of 13 percent in an urban sample (Naved and Persson 2005). Researchers have traced the rising frequency and cost of dowry in South Asia to a surplus of marriageable women relative to marriageable men—the result of imbalances in age structure combined with large age differences between spouses (Amin and Cain 1997). Reforming marriage practices in Bangladesh