This year, Bangladesh passed a new law stating that the consent of a child under 18 is no longer required for a marriage to occur as long as the parents of the couple as well as judicial courts rule that the marriage "is in the best interest of the underaged female or male."As many human rights groups consider this to be a huge step backwards for the rights of children, calls for better education and increased legal intervention from foreign humanitarian groups are prevalent. However, that's exactly what the problem is. These groups are foreign. They need to understand what is fundamentally plaguing the struggling Asian nation. Bangladesh's GDP per capita is less than $1,500, around bottom 20% globally (see source KNOEMA). This naturally leads to starvation and malnutrition. According to the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department, 56% of Bangladeshi children are significantly underweight. With an economy so insufficient, how can you expect the people to gain from an education and a legal system when they can barely feed themselves? If you watch documentaries and other media on the issue, you will see interviews where mothers are complaining about how they are unable to feed their children and they view child marriage as a way to make more food available to the remaining members of their family. They also sometimes express hopes that perhaps the child's new family will treat him/her (usually her) better that his/her original family ever could. This usually doesn't occur because, as previously mentioned, the Bangladeshi economy is very, very weak in general. Therefore, while I do believe that child marriage is a very serious issue, I also believe that it is really a byproduct of extreme poverty more so than oppressive mysogynic sentiments. Would it not be more effective for humanitarian groups to instead encourage the Bangladeshi government to focus more on measures to benefit the nation's finances (i.e. attracting manufacturing, augmenting exports of natural resources, etc.)? Wouldn't the increased national wealth from these actions help families improve their living standards and therefore decrease their reliance on child marriage as a way to save money?
https://knoema.com/sijweyg/world-gdp-per-capita-ranking-2017-data-and-charts-forecast
I agree that looking at the socioeconomic relations between sexual violence and poverty are important. Some prevention programs have worked on empowering females in low-income communities to start their own businesses/other measures of economic empowerment.
This is true not only in developing countries but also in countries such as the US (http://www.pcar.org/poverty-and-sexual-violence).
There is definitely something to be said about how economic vulnerability has strong connections to why sexual violence is still prevalent in our world today as well as the inherent misogynistic laws/policies within government structure that has allowed male dominance to prevail
http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/kabeer_hdr14.pdf
While it is true that the problem has economic roots since child marriage is invariably linked to poverty in the area, to say it is a poverty issue would only be covering a small part of the problem. Child marriage happens around the world (https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/where-does-it-happen/), and it has become a cultural and social norm. At the end of the day, these children are still losing their right to choose who they marry, and to justify it by saying the society is trying to bring them out of poverty is unfair. Like Rachna was said earlier in the thread, economic empowerment programs bring the most potential for lifting the status of girls/women in these areas. Sacrificing their rights under the pretense of lifting them out of poverty should not be tolerated. The citizens of the United States do not expect to have to give up certain rights so that their nation can focus on economic development; we expect our government to do both because that is their duty.
I do believe that decreasing poverty is extremely important towards combating this issue; it is for countless numbers of others. It certainly needs to be a focus of nations like Bangladesh, just not at the expense of their citizens' rights.