Human Rights Watch welcomes the opportunity to provide input drawn from our research on Bangladesh’s obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
A. Marriage Rights (Article 16 and 13a)
Bangladesh has the highest rate of child marriage in Asia, with a particularly shocking number of girls marrying before the age of 15. The prevalence of child marriage has devastating consequences for individual girls, their families, and Bangladesh’s development as a whole.
Child Marriage
Between 2005 and 2013, 29 percent of girls in Bangladesh married before the age of 15 and 65 percent married before the age of 18.[1] Despite a commitment by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2014 to end child marriage under age 15 by 2021 and to end child marriage under age 18 by 2041, the government has made little progress in reducing child marriage and has backtracked on these commitments in a destructive manner by seeking to create changes in the law that would effectively lower the age of marriage for girls from 18 to 16[2]
Causes and Consequences
Gender discrimination feeds social attitudes and customs that harm girls at every stage of their lives and fuel the country’s extremely high rate of child marriage. Desperate poverty remains a daily reality for many families in Bangladesh, and many parents see child marriage as their best option to safeguard the future of a daughter they feel they can neither feed nor educate nor protect. Bangladesh’s status as one of the countries in the world most affected by natural disasters and climate change adds an additional element of hardship to many families, especially those living in the most marginal and disaster-affected parts of the country.[3] In many of the villages Human Rights Watch visited in the course of researching the report Marry Before Your House is Swept Away, child marriage is not only socially acceptable but also expected.
Child marriage around the world is associated with many harmful consequences, including health dangers associated with early pregnancy, lower educational achievement for girls who marry earlier, a higher incidence of spousal violence, and an increased likelihood of poverty.[4] Research shows that pregnant girls aged 10-14 are five times more likely to die during delivery than mothers aged 20-24; girls aged 15-19 are still twice as likely to die during delivery than women aged 20-24.[5] A study across 7 countries found that girls who married before the age of 15 were more likely to experience spousal abuse than women who married after the age of 25.[6] Global data shows that girls from the poorest 20 percent of families are twice as likely to marry before 18 as girls whose families are among the richest 20 percent.[7]
Inadequate Government Response
At the July 2014 Girls Summit in London, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina committed to end marriage for girls under 15 and reduce by more than one-third the number of girls between the ages of 15 and 18 who marry by 2021. She further pledged to end all child marriages before the age of 18. The legal age of marriage in Bangladesh is currently 18 for women and 21 for men, but the law is weak, outdated, rarely enforced, and widely ignored.[8] As part of this effort, the prime minister pledged that her government would: 1) reform Bangladesh’s law which prohibits child marriage, the Child Marriage Restraint Act (CMRA) before 2015; 2) develop a national plan of action on ending child marriage by the end of 2014; and 3) take other steps to change social norms and engage civil society in the fight against child marriage.[9] But within weeks of pledging to end child marriage, Sheikh Hasina’s government proposed new legislation to lower the age of child marriage to 16.[10] Subsequent drafts of the proposed changes to the law have retained 18 as the age of marriage for girls, but proposed sweeping exceptions to that minimum, for example permitting marriage from 16 on with parental consent, that would constitute a de facto lowering of the age of marriage. Amid fierce opposition from activists and international partners to the proposed change in the age of marriage, the government’s effort to develop a national plan of action on ending child marriage has stalled, as has the process of reforming the law.
Addressing these issues can be complicated, but as long as the government looks the other way, or even facilitates child marriage, for example, when local government officials provide forged birth certificates,[11] marrying off young daughters will be a survival strategy for parents who feel unable to care for their children or succumb to social pressures to marry their daughters off early.
Discriminatory Personal Laws
About 330,000 women in Bangladesh are divorced, according to government data, and an unknown number live separated from husbands.[12] Rather than offer equal protection, Bangladesh’s discriminatory personal laws often trap women in abusive marriages or propel many of them into poverty when marriages fall apart. As we documented in our report, Will I Get My Dues…Before I Die? especially for poor women, discriminatory personal laws contribute to homelessness, hunger, and ill health for those divorced or separated and their dependents.[13] ......
Lack of Marital Property Rights
Despite the significant contributions that Bangladeshi women make to their marital households and assets, Bangladesh has no legal regime governing marital property. The 2010 law against domestic violence fills this legal gap to some extent. It gives a victim of domestic violence the right to reside in a “shared residence.”[20] The law also treats acts that cause “economic loss” as domestic violence. These include cases where a man refuses to let his wife enjoy or use properties and facilities that she is entitled to use because of her family relationship, denies her daily necessities, or deprives her of gifts she received during marriage.[21] However, apart from these protections in the law against domestic violence, neither civil laws nor personal laws in Bangladesh recognize, define, or set out rules for control over marital property during marriage or the division of marital property on an equal basis between spouses upon divorce.
Married women make contributions in many forms to family homes, businesses, fields, and other assets, providing vastly more unpaid household and caregiving labor than men. All married women whom Human Rights Watch interviewed for the report Will I Get My Dues…Before I Die? bore almost sole responsibility for household work, including cooking, cleaning, washing, grazing livestock, and fetching water. Many said they contributed significantly financially to their households at the time of, or during, marriage to their husbands to aid in their education and careers. Almost all women said they gave their husband or in-laws a dowry. Yet despite these myriad contributions, all but a handful of the women told Human Rights Watch they were unable to exercise control over their income and marital property. Nor were they able to recoup anything or have their economic value recognized when their marriages ended.
Most divorced or separated women described severe economic hardship, including losing marital homes, living on the street, begging for food, working as live-in domestics to have a roof over their heads, pulling children from school to work, struggling with ill health, and lacking resources to deal with any of these problems.[22]
Courtroom Battles and Social Assistance
Bangladesh established specialized family courts that deal with separation, divorce, and maintenance cases. But courts are so plagued with obstacles to timely maintenance, such as delays, dysfunction, and burdensome procedures, that women wait months or years for any result. Some women even face harassing counter-suits by husbands. Human Rights Watch’s research found that there are significant barriers to, and shortcomings in, Bangladesh’s social assistance programs, which fail to reach many women in extreme economic hardship after separation or divorce, and they fail to address women’s multiple vulnerabilities such as disability, ill-health, old age, and marital breakdown.
Labor Rights (Article 11)
In the past five years, two major disasters have taken numerous lives, many of them of women working in garment factories, at Rana Plaza and Tazreen. Garments account for almost 80 percent of the country’s export earnings and contribute more than 10 percent of GDP.[23] Industry growth drives Bangladesh’s economic boom, but it should not come at the price of the safety and health of workers.
Garment Work
80 percent of garment workers in Bangladesh are women.[24] A recent Human Rights Watch Report, Whoever Raises Their Head Suffers the Most found factories expose women to abuse, unsafe conditions, discrimination when it comes to wages and maternity leave, and anti-union tactics by employers, including assaults on union organizers. [25] More than 1,100 workers died in the catastrophic Rana Plaza collapse on April 24, 2013 and efforts are underway to make Bangladesh factories safer, but the government and Western retailers can and should do more to enforce international labor standards to protect workers’ rights, including their right to form unions and advocate for better conditions.[26]
Abuse
Workers report violations including physical assault, verbal abuse, forced overtime, denial of paid maternity leave, and failure to pay wages and bonuses on time or in full. The vast majority of garment workers are women, while supervisors and managers are mostly men, and sometimes the verbal abuse of women workers is of a sexual nature.[27] In 2009, the Bangladesh High Court issued strong guidelines to prevent and respond to sexual harassment at the workplace, which have yet to be systematically implemented.
Barriers to Forming Unions
While Bangladesh has changed some labor laws, including provisions to ease and facilitate the union registration process, there are significant legal barriers to forming unions, which have yet to be amended.[28] In practice, even though there has been a growth in the number of unions registered since 2013, labor authorities have arbitrarily rejected registration applications of newly formed unions.[29] Union leaders told Human Rights Watch that they continue to be targeted by threats, intimidation, and sometimes physical assault at the hands of factory management or hired third parties. In some factories, workers leading efforts to form unions have been dismissed for their organizing activities.
The Bangladesh government’s mechanism for investigating unfair labor practices is opaque and lacks process—workers who complain are not even assured the right to be heard during the investigations and the outcomes of complaints and action taken remains unknown.
Education (Article 10)
Girls in Bangladesh have made tremendous strides in education. For example, the UN notes that in 2013 Bangladesh had achieved gender parity in primary school enrolment.[30]However, obstacles remain to achieving total participation of girls in school throughout their education. Some of these obstacles include child marriage, indirect costs that burden poor families, distance to school, lack of water and sanitation facilities and sanitary supplies in schools, and sexual harassment of girls on the way to school and at school.
Exclusion of Girls
Lack of access to education is both a cause and a consequence of child marriage in Bangladesh. The link between access to education and child marriage is borne out by research finding that in Bangladesh women with primary, secondary, and higher education were respectively 24 percent, 72 percent, and 94 percent less likely to marry at a young age compared to women with no formal education.[31] Children that are out of school also often end up in the worst forms of labor.
While Bangladesh has made progress in abolishing school fees, students face associated costs for notebooks, pens, paper, textbooks, uniforms, transportation, and tutoring which put education out of reach for many poor families. Many married girls and their families interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that they had to leave school, often because of costs associated with education, and once they were out of school they were expected to marry or work. For others, a child marriage was the cause of them dropping out; when girls leave school to marry, schools do not intervene.
Other factors pushing girls out of school, especially as they reach secondary school age, include long distances to school in some areas, and unchecked sexual harassment of girls by men and boys on their way to school.
A lack of private toilets and sanitary supplies are also a factor in some girls’ absence from school. This makes it more difficult for girls to manage as they reach the onset of menstruation, when they become particularly likely to miss school. A study found that 40 percent of girls reported missing school during menstruation for an average of three school days each menstrual cycle.[32] In this study, 82 percent of girls said their school facilities were not appropriate for managing menstrual hygiene, only 12 percent had access to female-only toilets with water and soap available, and only 3 percent said the toilet they used had a trash bin.[33] Gaps in attendance caused by a lack of sanitation and care for menstrual hygiene also compromise girls’ eligibility for government stipends linked to attendance, cause girls to fall behind in their studies, and undermine parental support for keeping girls in school.[34]
Protecting Students, Teachers, and Schools
As detailed by the Committee in its concept note for its 2014 discussion on girls’ and women’s right to education, in conflict-affected areas, “girl’s access to education is jeopardized due to among others, insecurity, the occupation of schools by state and non-state actors as well as targeted attacks and threats against girls and their teachers by non-State actors.”
A 2012 report on the human rights situation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts by the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs documented the destruction of a school by the Bangladesh army, the burning of schools by armed settlers, and the expropriation by the army of a school built by the international organization World Vision.[35]
Bangladesh has two laws that should regulate schools and universities from being interfered with by security forces. Under the “Manoeuvres, Field Firing and Artillery Practice Act” military forces are not authorized to “pass over, or encamp, construct military works of a temporary character, or execute military Manoeuvres” that enter or interfere with any educational institution.[36]
Under the “Acquisition and Requisition of Immovable Property Ordinance” educational institutions may not be requisitioned even for a public purpose or in the public interest, “save in the case of emergency requirement for the purpose of maintenance of transport or communication system.”[37]
Bangladeshi troops who partake in UN peacekeeping operations are also obliged to not use schools in their operations.[38]
Health (Article 12 and 14)
Women in Bangladesh, and particularly rural women, face health risks from arsenic poisoning in the drinking water supply.[39]
Arsenic Poisoning
Arsenic occurs naturally in Bangladesh’s groundwater, and contaminates the drinking water of many millions of Bangladesh’s rural poor. Arsenic does not contaminate the drinking water of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka or other large cities, where drinking water comes from deep aquifers of higher-quality water, or from treated surface water, which is then distributed through a network of pipes. Rather, it affects hand-pumped, mostly shallow, tubewells across huge swaths of rural Bangladesh. The common figure given for the number of shallow tubewells across the country is about 10 million, although this is a crude estimate.[40] Women are overwhelmingly responsible for the task of fetching water and other domestic work, Human Rights Watch found.[41] This exposes them to harmful health effects or forces them to travel great distances in order to find safe drinking water for themselves and their households.
Today, an estimated 43,000 people die each year from arsenic-related illness in Bangladesh, according to one study. The authors go on to estimate that, depending on progress of ending exposure, between 1 and 5 million of the 90 million children estimated to be born between 2000 and 2030 will eventually die of diseases caused by exposure to arsenic in drinking water.[42]
LGBT Rights
Bangladesh’s lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women face cultural, social, and political obstacles to acceptance as well as threats of violence. Lesbian women and sex workers continue to face discrimination and stigmatism. Furthermore, Bangladesh government policy and harassment by government ministry officials violates the privacy and right to work of transgender women, or hijras, in Bangladesh.
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