Teaching boys to respect females can resist child marriages
Boys should be addressed and taught in schools as well as at family levels to treat women with respect, and that will be a fruitful measure to resist child marriages, said speakers at a roundtable in the capital yesterday.
The issue of addressing boys came up as inadequate social security had been cited by parents as one of the main reasons for marrying off their daughters before they reach 18, they said at the roundtable on “Safe Environment to Resist Child Marriage” organised by Brac and the daily Prothom Alo at the latter's Karwan Bazar office .
"When a boy grows up seeing his father beating his mother, he fails to act positively towards a female child," said Farzana Brownia, chairman and CEO of Swarnokishori Network Foundation, a platform of empowered girls.
Abul Bashar Md Fakhruzzaman, upazila nirbahi officer of Keraniganj, mentioned how families' firm stance in favour of child marriage often makes it difficult for them to resist such practices. "A lot of unregistered marriages take place in villages and unfortunately local representatives still issue false birth certificates," he said.
Farah Kabir, country director of ActionAid, Bangladesh, stressed the need for parents' counseling and career counseling of young children.
Rasheda K Choudhury, executive director of Campaign for Popular Education, and Tania Nusrat Zaman, deputy chief of party, Plan International Bangladesh, both suggested scaling up of awareness programmes by the government and non-government bodies."We should also stop aggression of harmful foreign culture in our media which do not teach us how to respect women," Rasheda said pointing to Hindi serials.
Sarah Hossain, honorary executive director of Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust, and Prof Sadeka Halim, who recently assessed Brac's programme Meyeder Jonno Nirapod Nagorikotto (safe citizenship for girls) being implemented in 405 secondary schools of 13 districts, also spoke.
According to a study titled “Effectiveness of Social Protection Programme in Preventing Child Marriage” by Disaster Management Watch for Save the Children Bangladesh, parents consider the insecure social environment as the main rationale for child marriage. The research findings, disseminated at Cirdap building yesterday, showed that social safety net programmes, such as school stipend, have largely failed to create incentives among parents to delay marriage of their daughters.
Stipend covers less than 10 percent of the education cost of a child and the cash provided is inadequate and irregular, showed the research conducted in a union in Bhola in September 2015, on 224 households, where marriages took place between October 2014 and September 2015.
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