Girls’ education, child marriage and child labor in Bangladesh: Contested discourses

• In Event: Critical and feminist analyses of policy and media discourses

Proposal

Recent years have seen a rise in advocacy against child marriage, specifically in the context of the right to education. Girls’ education is framed as protective in prevention of child marriage. Reversely, early marriage correlates with increased rate of school drop outs among adolescent girls. Opportunities for education and prevention of child marriage are intertwined within discursive framings of girls’ rights. This study extracted from a larger dissertation study on child labor and schooling in Bangladesh examines discourses on child marriage through a multi-vocal investigation of policy representatives and communities where both child labor and child marriage are prevalent.
In 2017, a national Bangladesh government campaign spread the overarching message, “We will stop child marriage.” The state also passed the Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017, which made marriage under 18 years illegal except in special circumstances. Civil society and human rights advocates widely condemned the law’s loophole that allows marriage below age 18 under “special circumstances”, arguing that the loophole furthered ambiguity towards girls’ right to education. Despite international praise for advances in gender equality in school enrollment and policy actions such as targeted stipends for girls’ education (Khandker, Fuwa & Pitt, 2003), the rate of child marriage for girls below age 18 is one of the highest rates in the world in Bangladesh (Girls not brides, 2017).
I argue that the national eradication campaign and legal reform are not the only governing factors determining the rate of child marriage. This paper examines the place of child marriage among competing discourses of girls’ right to education, beyond macro theories (Wortham, 2012) of social determinism such as poverty constraints or of female victimhood. The theoretical framework, based on populist post structuralism (Tobin, 1988) and Bakhtinian discourse analysis, provides insight on the complex and contradictory perceptions of girls’ education and child marriage. Populist post-structuralism empowers insiders to “explain the meanings of their actions and analyze the institutions of which they are a part”; furthermore, “post-structuralism suggests that the meanings of…social phenomena are indeterminate and multiple, rather than fixed and singular” (Tobin, 1988, p. 174). Actors’ social beliefs, values and assumptions of girls’ education and empowerment compete with the beliefs, values and assumptions that underpin child marriage.
This study is part of a larger mixed methods dissertation fieldwork which examines harmful child labor and access to schooling in Bangladesh over a 7 month period, between June 2017 and January 2018. I employ statistical analysis of the Bangladesh Labor Force Survey 2013 and a video cued multi-vocal ethnography (Tobin, 1989) embedded within ethnographic case studies, of factories in an urban slum in Dhaka and dry fish fields in rural Cox Bazaar, Chittagong. The statistical analysis provides evidence of the connections between education, child marriage and paid and unpaid household work. Compared to unmarried girls in school, girls who have been married are 14 times more likely to be in paid work only, 12 times more likely to be involved in domestic labor only (foregoing paid work and schooling), 11.5 times as likely to be involved in a combination of paid work and domestic labor, and 8 times more likely to be involved in outside household work only. These results are significant at a p value of .001.
My main informants among the urban slum community were girls aged 10-18, working in an aluminum bangle factory. Other informants were male child workers, parents and community members, including teachers. Similarly in rural Cox Bazaar, my informants were child workers in the dry fish industry (determined to be harmful by the US department of labor), parents, and teachers. Female child marriage was prevalent at both sites, and bride prices or dowries were a common practice. Despite the relatively lower cost of school enrollment, poor parents did not send their daughters to school but instead took large loans from microcredit schemes, widely available through NGOs, to pay the bride prices. My findings suggest that many families misallocate the microcredit funds to pay for bride price. At least some of the families recuperate these funds through wages of siblings who leave school for work: the connection between child marriage, child work and education are complex and entangled.
I filmed and edited two videos of child workers at work and at home, and have screened the videos for feedback to relevant actors: insiders such as children, parents, community members and outsiders such as policy representatives, and I/NGO officers and specialists. Two moments in the films serve as specific cues on child marriage. In one scene in rural Cox Bazaar, a mother of working children offers to sell her 8-year-old daughter. She says, “what will I do with a girl? It is so difficult to get girls married and pay the dowry.” The comment surfaces from the mother’s recent experiences of marrying her 13-year-old daughter whose dowry was still an unpaid debt. Another cue is a scene from urban Dhaka slum: a widowed father of a working girl of age 14 says (excerpt), “Is it good to keep a grown girl at home? It is a matter of honor.” These two cues utilize discourses that circulate on girls’ value and place in society, and in the family. The multivocal investigation on child marriage relies on feedback that policy representatives, parents and teachers, and working children have provided on these two video cues. For example, working girls’ reflections show they value education and yet also conceive of marriage as a safety net. Policy representatives such as INGO specialists term child marriage “a lost cause,” a subversive authorization of parental beliefs that girls are safer in the husbands’ home.
This study provides innovative methods to examine the explanations of multi-level actors on discourses concerning child marriage, child labor and societal values, uncovering the unstable and shifting meanings given to the girl child regarding education and marriage. One of the study’s possible policy implications is how child marriage advocacy can shift from campaigns and legal reform to school curriculum, and community-based dialogue that challenge the values and assumptions of marriage as a safe place for girls.

Author

• Natasha Mansur, Penn State University