Book Chapter (James P. Grant School of Public Health (JPGSPH))

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10361/16675

Browse

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Navigating towards a ‘Good future’: Significance of appearance in aspirations of Dhaka urban middle-class girls
(Berghahn Books, 2020) Camellia, Suborna
Against the backdrop of rapid urbanisation, appearance has become the core of Dhaka middle-class girl's understanding of who they are and who they want to be. This chapter investigates significance of appearance among thirty-two Dhaka middle-class girls in relation to their envisioned ‘good future'. Findings shows that girls use appearance to navigate between their contradictory roles and to avoid shame. This chapter argues that while middle-class girls can chalk out thicker maps to steer towards a 'good future', they are however, more at risk of experiencing shame due to the repressive sexual norms and a heightened pressure to become modern women
Heard and Hard Reality of Maternal Health: Are We Oversimplifying the Challenges in Bangladesh?
(World Scientific, 2020) Afsana, Kaosar
Maternal health largely reflects women’s status in a society (Shen and Williamson 1999, 210–211). It is a domain that explicates women’s basic access and rights to economic livelihood, education, healthcare, nutrition, equality, justice, and many more (Kuruvilla et al. 2014, 540–541). Every day 830 women die from preventable maternal causes across the world, with 99% in developing countries, revealing the level of global inequality (World Health Organization 2018). Maternal death is defined as “death of woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management but not from accidental or incidental causes” (Alkema et al. 2016, 463). Existing research has shown that the period from conception to childbirth is in fact shaped and patterned by social and cultural values impacting women’s status prevailing in a society (Afsana and Rashid 2009, 128–133; Davis-Floyd 1994, 1125; Jordan 1997, 56–61). The interplay of different stakeholders and systems in society influences a woman’s journey throughout her life. In this paper, I will present the state of maternal health in Bangladesh and the obstacles the country is facing in reducing maternal deaths…
Early Marriage among Adolescent Boys and Young Men in Urban Informal Settlements of Bangladesh
(Young Lives, 2020) Biswas, Subas; Azmi, Raia; Mowri, Seama; Ahsan, Sairana; Sultana, Rafia; Rashid, Sabina F.
Early marriage continues to be a major public health concern and a violation of child rights, particularly in developing countries.1 Girls are disproportionately more likely to marry before the age of 18 compared to boys, and the vast majority of research, policy and advocacy on child marriage relates specifically to girls (Parsons et al. 2015; Patton et al. 2016; Svanemyr et al. 2015; Wodon et al. 2017). However, adolescent boys also marry early.2 Although the prevalence of child marriage among boys and young males is lower than girls, in recent times, the global prevalence of early marriages among adolescent boys has gained some prominence. An analysis by the United Nation’s Children Fund (UNICEF) reported that 115 million boys and men were married before the age of 18 (with one in five before age 15) (Gastón, Misunas, and Cappa 2019). However, in South Asia this rate is around 5% (Malhotra et al. 2011; Verma, Sinha, and Khanna 2013). The Bangladesh Demographic Health Survey 2011 reported that nationally around 4% of men aged 20-24 were married by age 18 (National Institute of Population Research and Training, Mitra and Associates, and ICF International 2013). However, boys residing in poor, urban informal settlements are more likely to marry early compared to the national average, with a study of informal settlements in Dhaka finding that around 46% of males were married before age 18 (Khan 2014). Although the risks and consequences of early marriage differ for boys and girls on account of biological and social differences, the practice is nonetheless a human rights violation for children of both sexes. Similar to child brides, when boys marry early they also face many potentially negative health and economic consequences which threaten their well-being (Greene et al. 2015; Misunas, Gastón, and Cappa 2019). Adolescent boys who marry early experience an abrupt transition to adulthood with pressure to drop out of school and to assume new household financial responsibilities. This potentially impacts their job prospects, owing to being deprived of skills that continued education would have allowed (Gastón, Misunas, and Cappa 2019). Being young, they are often psychologically and socially unprepared to take on the responsibilities that come with marriage and fatherhood (Matlakala, Makhubele, and Mashilo 2018). In spite of this, the vulnerabilities of adolescent boys in early marriages remain largely ignored in the development agenda, which puts more emphasis on the vulnerabilities experienced by girls and women due to the disadvantages the latter face with respect to gender inequality (The Lancet 2015). Boys’ and young men’s experiences and perspectives remain significantly less researched and overwhelmingly neglected by social interventions, policy and advocacy programmes (Greene et al. 2015). 1 ‘Early marriage’ is defined as any marriage or union between two people where one or both partners is under the age of 18 (UNICEF 2005). However, the Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 sets the minimum age of 21 years for males and 18 for females for marriage in Bangladesh (Government of Bangladesh 2017). 2 We prefer to use ‘early marriage’ instead of ‘child marriage’ as ‘child marriage’ is heavily associated with girl’s marriage in the Bangladeshi context. When a boy gets married before their legal age of 21 years, this is considered as an ‘early marriage’ rather than ‘child marriage’.
The Heterogeneous Lives of Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Urban Slums in Bangladesh
(Young Lives, 2020) Ahsan, Sairana; Mowri, Seama; Biswas, Subas; Sultana, Rafia; Azmi, Raia; Rashid, Sabina F.
Child marriage is defined as any marriage taking place before the age of 18 years (UNICEF 2018). Around 720 million women worldwide were married before they were 18 years old (UNICEF 2014), of which almost 50% were in South Asia (UNFPA and UNICEF 2016a), where 1 in 2 women marry under the age of 18 (Plan Asia Regional Office and ICRW 2013). Child marriage is a violation of human rights and a deep-rooted phenomenon that reflects the vulnerability of adolescent girls in society, as they are often treated as a financial liability for the family (UNICEF n.d.). Poverty and illiteracy are the main drivers of child marriage and, although it has declined in the last 30 years, child marriage is still one of the foremost risks to adolescent girls’ health and well-being (UNICEF n.d.). Adolescents represent almost 20% of Bangladesh’s total population, of whom 14.4 million are girls (Ainul et al. 2017). Bangladesh also has the highest prevalence of child marriage within South Asia (UNFPA and UNICEF 2016b) and fourth highest internationally (UNICEF 2016). In Bangladesh, child marriage is not considered, by most people, to be a form of sexual violence which negatively impacts the health of adolescent girls due to an increased risk of early pregnancy (UNICEF n.d.). Studies in rural and peri-urban Bangladesh have identified poverty, rigid social norms, lack of education and earning opportunities, higher dowry for older girls, and parental fear of sexual violence as causes of early marriage among girls (Plan Asia Regional Office and ICRW 2013; Mahmud and Amin 2006; Chowdhury 2004). However, there remains a dearth of knowledge regarding what drives early marriage in urban areas, especially slums. To address this, a large mixed-methods research study was conducted between 2015 and 2018, which aimed to understand the phenomenon of early marriage in urban slums, followed by an in-depth exploration of selected cases. Overall, the study found that: ● The dynamics of child marriage in urban slums are heavily influenced by the interplay of personal, socio-cultural and structural factors. ● Poverty and lack of education are major drivers of child marriage. ● Young girls from poor, broken families seek child marriage as a way out of poverty. ● Girls from supportive or influential families exhibited strong aspirations to study and work, despite setbacks such as early marriage or early pregnancy. ● A major and emerging cause of child marriage was romantic relationships between adolescent boys and girls. ● Parents’ decision-making around child marriage was driven by concerns over the safety and security of adolescent daughters, given the high prevalence of organised crime and sexual harassment in slums. ● The advent of the garment manufacturing industry has exponentially increased employment opportunities, especially for adolescent girls, as 80% of garment workers in Bangladesh are female (World Bank 2017).
Binary Framing of Consent and Coercion of Child Marriage: A Critique
(Young Lives, 2020) Mowri, Seama; Sultana, Rafia; Biswas, Subas; Azmi, Raia; Ahsan, Sairana; Rashid, Sabina F.
The rhetoric around child marriage continues to be framed in binary terms, with the difference between ‘arranged’ and ‘love’ marriages hinging on the concept of consent.1 The context in which consent is constructed, however, remains less explored. ‘Lack of consent’ is a very hard concept to define. Most studies tend to focus on the support for, and history of, victims of non-consent (Abu Amara, Guiné, and Hamel 2013) rather than seeking to define it, since the research concerns women who report being the victims of forced marriage. Overall, the concept of consent has been left relatively undefined and understudied. It is important to rectify this and collectively agree to what constitutes affirmative consent, so we can truly know how far theory and practice coincide, and whether genuine consent is truly possible within the institutions of poverty and marriage. In this chapter, we examine the socio-cultural construction of consent, especially with regard to early or child marriage,2 and the intersecting structural inequalities that constrain particular groups of young women in the urban slums of Bangladesh. As Nicole-Claude Mathieu (1985) rightly pointed out, ‘giving in is not the same as consenting’; similarly, our analysis of 65 qualitative interviews with adolescent girls and young women also suggests that consenting to marriage is almost never free of degrees of socio-cultural obligations, control of sexuality, persuasion, pressure, threat and force from different actors. We explore a range of situations where young women yield to social pressures and consent to marriage. However, ‘pressure’ in this context is not necessarily limited to violence or intimidation, but rather marriage as a norm that cannot be challenged. The girls attribute their early marriages and lack of alternatives to circumstances ‘beyond their control’. The affection and trust that they felt for their parents prevented them from labelling their obligations as coercion. On the other hand, there are cases of girls who claimed to have been ‘forced to consent’ to marry their boyfriends who would have otherwise ‘committed suicide’. These narratives warrant contextualisation to determine the consent–coercion continuum.

Browse

Recent Submissions