Penn-UNICEF 2012 Summerprogram on Advances in Social Norms and Social Change

Saying ‘No’ to Child Marriage in Bangladesh: changing Social Norms

Penn-UNICEF 2012 Summer Program on Advances in Social Norms and Social Change Tania Sultana, UNICEF Bangladesh Philadelphia, July 13, 2012

Background and Problem Statement

Bangladesh is an overpopulated country with 150 million population and about 66 million children1. The TFR is 2.3 as per BDHS 2011. Findings shown that with current TFR, on an average; women will have 25 percent of their births before reaching age 20, which is mostly from adolescent age group as they 23% of the total population2. The literacy rate among the 15-19 age group is 82% and 52% for 25+ age group and education is a priority area of Government of Bangladesh. However, the social norms and customary practices limit the involvement of children in decision making within the family and the community on different crucial issues, such as; education, work, and marriage, which also associated with various forms of violence, abuses and negligence. The Child Marriage is high prevalence in Bangladesh and in particular girls are victims of this violence that denies their right to health, nutrition, education, freedom from violence, abuse and exploitation of childhood.

The prevalence of Child marriage in Bangladesh is still very high though the Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 2007 (p-79) shown the declining rate of child marriage over the years. The rate is 66% in Bangladesh among the women

1 The estimated proportion of children under-eighteen was taken from: “Child Poverty and Disparities in Bangladesh, A research study towards Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities”, UNICEF 2009. The share of children in the total population was applied to the Sample Vital Registration System 2009 population (146.7 million) to estimate the child population for 2010.

2 Statistical pocketbook – Bangladesh, 1998, cited in the Progress Report, Empowerment adolescents Girls, PBA No: SC/2005/0816-01, 2007

1 aged 20-24, as the median age of marriage increased to 16.4 in 20073 from 15 years in 2000, while the legal age of marriage for girls in Bangladesh is 18 years and for boys it is 21 years.

Fig: Declining trend of Child marriage from 1989 to 2007, BDHS 2007

The Child Marriage Restraint Act amended in 1984 conditions the law to stop Child marriage in Bangladesh. The punishment includes a minimal fines (1000 BDT or about 13 USD) and imprisonment (up to one month) for any person who performs, conducts or directs any child marriage. This is applicable for parents, who decide for marrying of their children and the marriage register or kazi who registers marriages. However, the law enforcement is very limited and parents are continuing the practice by increasing the age in the marriage registry form as in most cases they do not have birth certificates.

Consequences of Child Marriage

There are significant and long term negative consequences of child marriage. The education of these girls usually ends as they are often withdrawn form schools4. Child marriage followed by early childbearing leads to higher maternal morbidity and mortality5, as well as higher infant mortality rates (Mensch 2005; UNICEF 2005; Save

3 National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT), Mitra and Associates, and ORC Macro. (2005). Bangladesh Demographic Health Survey 2004. Dhaka, Bangladesh and Calverton, MD (USA).

4 Report on baseline findings 2007, JHU/CCP 2007:1.

5 As per MMR survey 2011, the ratio is 194 per 100000 live births.

2 the Children 2004; Bott & Jejeebhoy 2003). The trend of early child bearing is more prominent in rural areas and among poor communities, compared to urban areas. Abuses and violence related to ‘dowry’ are also widespread due to inequity power relations of spouses. A KAP study shows that almost 90% respondents knows that child marriage is harmful which are associated with early child bearing and health risks. Parent know that their daughter become over burden in family work including take care of family members, household works.

Child Marriage from Social Norms Perspective

Child marriage is a deep rooted social norm in Bangladesh. In a traditional social structure, child marriage is the conditional preferences of parents and families influenced by a set of factual belief. Families believe that they have valid reasons to marry of their girl child. Conditionals preferences for obeying a norm, meaning that preferences will be conditional upon having expectations about other people’s, conformity (Bicchieri, 2006). The empirical expectations of parents based on their personal normative belief and they prefer to conform with the decision of early marriage of daughters as most people of the community also do it. The normative expectations is that parents or families believe that their community think that they should get their daughters marry off early like others to protect their girls from sexual abuse or losing chastity as well as family honour. The conditional preference is also triggered by the fear of social sanction of their network in the community. The social sanctions of bad words or humiliation or paying higher dowry may be faced by parents or families who keep their daughters at home for long time or if marriage is delayed.

There is strong interdependent of social expectation and the action or behaviour of people (Bicchieri, 2006). The ‘marriage’ script includes dowry in Bangladesh and thus child marriage exacerbated by this social norms of dowry6. Not paying dowry would be even worse sanction which sometimes tolled to death of girls, which causes parents to provide dowry to boys’ families during wedding. Here, the factual belief is dowry increases with the age increase of girls, which often unaffordable to families of girls. Thus parents decide early marriage of girls under the social pressure, to pay less ‘dowry’.

6 MOHFW, 1998, Bangladesh country Report, South Asia Conference on Adolescents, UNFPA, Delhi, 21-23 July, 1998.

3 Poverty is another significant cause of child marriage where the factual belief of poor families is considering girls as economic burden. Families have to pay dowry for their girls during marriage as well as girls do not have economic contributing to her parents’ family.

In the context of Bangladesh, the social construction of girls is as the property of their husbands’ family and parents just brought up them until wedding. The social expectation does not allow parents to take any economic supports from daughters even though they are in need. This empirical expectation has correlation with the factual belief of considering girls as economic burden.

Figure: Contributing Factors of Child Marriage in Bangladesh

Research shows that continuing education has strong association with delayed marriage of girls and the risk of early marriage is higher for out of school children (UNICEF 2007; Lloyd 2006; & International Center for Research on Women – ICRW 2011). Because of less availability of secondary schools and difficulty of accessibility in schools have consequences of educational attainment of girls. Parents are reluctant to send their girls to school like others, could be an outcome of pluralistic ignorance. Families are doing it as a conditional preference, but their personal normative belief and attitude is negative towards child marriage. The factual belief is considering girls as economic burden and parents do not want to invest in educational expenditure. Withdrawing from school families is limiting the educational attainment, employment opportunities, economic security, and productive capacity.

Collective behavior is also influenced by knowledge gaps regarding negative consequences of child marriage. The wide social acceptance of child marriage is triggered by the limited knowledge regarding the legislation of child marriage act and poor law enforcement by relevant authorities.

Current Programming to combat Child Marriage

Considering the context and the intensity of the problem of child marriage, the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs (MOWCA) in Bangladesh, UNICEF Country office and other development partners initiated several programs in Bangladesh to prevent Child marriage. Most of the interventions were aimed to involving

4 adolescents and their relevant networks including families and communities to bring positive change.

Empowerment of Adolescents Initiatives The implementation of pilot project “Empowerment of Adolescents (‘Kishori Avijan’) is a significant part of these initiatives. The objectives are to protect children from all forms of violence, i.e. sexual exploitation, abuse and discrimination by creating an enabling environment; and to making children knowledgeable and empowering girls aimed to improve the quality of life of vulnerable adolescents, especially girls, in selected areas. The phase one of the project focused on the empowerment of adolescent girls through peer education, providing conditional cash for income generation or livelihood skill, civic engagement or personal development. However, the project assessment strongly recommended to include adolescent boys and involving parents as well as community leaders to create enabling environment.

Against this backdrop, the second phase of the EOA project implemented during 2006 to 2010 with two fold initiatives, i.e. 1) to empower adolescents, especially girls as Change agent who participate meaningfully in decisions that affect their lives, and to become active agents of social change; and 2) to create and sustain an enabling and supportive environment for adolescent girls’ development through community involvement. This time, the EOA interventions emphasized on the capacity building of GoB and partner NGOs on Child Development curriculum as the concept of children is Bangladesh is not clear. The Life Skills Based Education (LSBE) for adolescents has been implemented through partner NGOs and peer learning has been done through interpersonal communication for psychosocial protection and care. The conditional cash transfers or incentives for keeping children in schools and in some cases for livelihood trainings also induced parents to keep their children in school.

Advocacy at the national and local level fostered the implementation of EOA interventions and Communication activities implemented at the community level

5 through involving community leaders and the entertainment education events. Law enforcement through Peer Leaders’ initiatives and support of community influential has also been initiated.

Achievements and Challenges: what went well and what did not?

The assessment of the empowerment of adolescents (EOA), found that the decision making authorities are fathers or the male members of the families. Adolescents’ knowledge about their rights to the basic requirement is good in the working areas while knowledge is very low in general, which leads to the denial of their deserved status as mentioned in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). This traditional social norms and customary practices of patriarchal society promote the collective behavior of subordination of girls and women. The values and personal normative beliefs make it difficult for girls to claim their rights. Consequently, mothers and family members find it challenging to ensure the protection of their children in terms of health, education, nutrition and so on while they have limited knowledge.

The key achievements of the EOA initiative was raising awareness through peers around their own issues, and ensure their participation in implementation, monitoring and reporting which are empowering them to be an integral part of the process of social change. The project also developed communication strategy and implemented different behavior change communication (BCC) activities including interpersonal communication, peer discussions of adolescents and their mothers, interactive popular theatre shows, interactive film shows at the community with ‘Meena’ animation videos and folk shows followed by discussion.

The key challenges of existing interventions to prevent child marriage are multi- pronged as the decision of the child marriage is conditioned in certain situation. The deep rooted social norms of dowry system is one of key contributing factor and the empirical expectations of girls’ families and boys’ families should be addressed through improving gender perspective. Evaluation reports showed that lack of male participation became a hindrance as they are the decision makers. The absenteeism

6 of fathers in the community meetings was very common which can due to lack of trust network.

It has also been found that the community engagement initiatives were not much effective with religious leaders. The core group identification for building trust network was not adequate to create the diffusion and commitment. Moreover, the absence of harmonizing legal and social norms is also absent in current interventions and this area have to be improved through social norms change approaches.

‘Norm Shift’ Strategy – Saying ‘NO’ to Child Marriage

In absence of empirical expectations, people tempted to disobey social norms, (Christina Bicchieri & Hugo Mercier) especially to certain behavior which may conflict with some self-interest. Hence, to understand the macro and micro level causes, we need to conduct a causal analysis, specifically by area. As we want to change certain social norms, we have to create new positive norms to eliminate the negative social norms. Accordingly we need to change people’s expectations within their relevant reference network. To bring a norm shift we therefore need to develop a comprehensive communication strategy from social norms change lenses.

Network Analysis Child marriage is a deep rooted social norm in Bangladesh and caregivers or families prefer to conform to it on certain condition. As argued by Bicchieri, 2006, (a) most people in their relevant network conform to child marriage (empirical expectation), and (b) most people in their relevant network believe that they ought to conform to it (normative expectation). Hence, strategies to be developed based on extensive causal analysis and relevant network analysis of parents or families who conform to child marriage. We need to identify ‘core group’ in the communities from reference network analysis as people follow the behavior of relevant network.

Core Committee The core committee should include the following in the context of Bangladesh;

7 - religious leaders (Imams, Kazi/marriage registers, heads of faith based organizations)

- local influential (Ward Development Committee for supportive supervision and monitoring)

- families (mothers and fathers of girls)

Community Engagement & Trust Network It is obvious to induce right kind of social expectations to create the new norm of delaying marriage of girls through developing mutual beliefs and conditional preferences of members of the core committee. To provide information in the community regarding the disapproval of child marriage by many others is necessary as individuals may dislike a social norm as their personal normative beliefs are separate.

Organized Diffusion in communities The information dissemination from a trusted relevant network/ core group can create value deliberation (Mackie, Mercier, July 10) like Tostan case. We need to create diffusion of deliberation out from expanding core, i.e., from person to person, community to community (Muldoon 2011) which is possible through ‘trust network’. We need to change the empirical expectation as well as normative expectations though changing the factual belief. The trusted network will be built through community engagement in dialogues. The core group will change the factual beliefs through argumentation in community dialogues. To facilitate an enabling environment, families and communities should facilitate dialogue among them and with children for taking any crucial decisions. The community people should be communicated recurrently about negative consequences of child marriage through trusted network (Mackie 2010). An enabling environment should be created to listen to children, to speak for them and provide them the opportunities for overall development. IPC and Incentivization

8 We need to change personal normative beliefs and factual beliefs towards new norm by several interventions. These interventions are -

• Increase common knowledge on benefits of new norm though positive interpersonal commination (IPC); • Effective communication to build common knowledge on educational attainment of their children. Parents will also believe that others believe in delaying marriage and others know that delaying marriage will give many opportunities to their daughters. • Changing personal belief through entertainment education in mass and local media. For example, the reach of the mobile film units of government is almost 2.5 million people in the communities and the coverage of television viewership is around 78% of the population. The ‘Meena’ animation series is quite popular in Bangladesh and it is a child to child communication tool7 which can raise awareness among children regarding delaying marriage as well as has impact on creating enabling environment for children. Moreover, in the media dark areas, the Interactive Popular Theatre (IPT) shows followed by interactions are also very effective. • Incentivize for keeping girls in schools and providing livelihood training. Positive rewards for changing behavior. Need to motivate parents with the scripts of the schools as ‘safe zone’ which will also ensure protection of girl children and the fear of losing family honor. The Stipend program in Bangladesh can be a good example of incetivizing. However strong advocacy require to increase number of female secondary schools considering security issue and eventually it will increase girls’ enrollment and retention which will contribute in delaying the marriage of girls. . Changing Empirical Expectation Changing the personal normative belief is not sufficient to change certain behavior. Hence, we need to change the empirical expectations to abandon the norm of child marriage. Parents must be convinced that not only child marriage has negative consequences, but also that many others in one’s relevant network are abandoning it. Instead of having social sanction for not marry early, there should be social

7 Report on a Strategic review of The ‘Meena’ Communication Initiative (MCI) in Bangladesh, Rachel Carnegie, June 2005

9 sanction for marrying off daughters early age. We need to do the publicity to create diffusion among the critical mass.

Coordination and Public Pledge Coordination is obvious to generate the confidence among the relevant network, which will also lead to change the normative expectations. Changing common knowledge is not enough to build confidence to individuals; hence the community should have commitments and take ‘public pledge’ to stop child marriage. As showed in the Innocenti Insight, 2010, the transformation of social norms was possible in Tostan case through holistic programmes and collective deliberation of communities.

Harmonization of Legal, Moral and Social Belief As per the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), children should be free from abuses and exploitation in all aspects. The CRC denotes that caregivers should listen to children and their views must reflect in the decisions and actions taken on behalf of children. To protect the best interest of children, the caregivers, families and the communities need to take responsibilities. As mentioned by H. Guillot, 2012, harmonization of legal, moral and social norms is necessary to induce new social expectations. However, in the context of Bangladesh, we need to increase awareness about the legal sanction of child marriage along with triggering the feeling of moral gratification or guilt for not marrying off girls at early age. It is also essential to create commitment for social recognition of sanction for early marriage.

Way Forward: Concluding Remarks

The programmes and policies have to address all the complex aspects of social norms and negative practices to eliminate any harmful practice. Child marriage in

Bangladesh is influenced by several beliefs and external factors, which requires intensive analysis to address other issues also. Child marriage problem cannot be addressed with appliance of social norms theories only as it is a deep rooted social norm triggered by factual beliefs and empirical expectation. However, the factual

10 beliefs mentioned in this paper are contributing to the conditional preference of parents for child marriage and those have to be changed along with changing empirical expectations. The programme has to be holistic, where community led approaches will be implemented based to promote the new norms and the elimination of old norm. The strategies to be developed based on research outcome and proposed strategies and interventions can be incorporated in considering the applicability.

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