DILARPUR (Bangladesh): Khadija was 11 when she was wed. A year later, she fled back to her parents. Neither widowed nor divorced, Khadija ran away from in-laws who she says mistreated her and pressured her poor and landless father to make good on a promise to pay a dowry — an illegal but common practice throughout much of rural Bangladesh.
“I don’t know why Allah has punished me,” said Khadija, now 18, trying to hold back tears.
Like many Bangladeshi brides, Khadija was married at an age when, as she put it, “I didn’t know what it means to be a wife”.
Khadija said her in-laws confined her at home, kept her parents from visiting and often denied her enough food after her father failed to pay a 25,000 taka ($380) dowry.
She left behind a young husband, almost a playmate whom she misses a lot. “He was good, caring and playful. Soon I befriended him and started to like him a lot,” she said shyly.
“But my in-laws were rude. They pressured me to bring money from my father and then forced me out,” she said in Dilarpur, a poor and dusty village on the bank of the gently flowing Jamuneswari river and some 350 km north of Dhaka.
Bangladeshi Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia has vowed to protect women from injustice and guarantee their rights.
“But she (the prime minister) lives far away from places where the injustices occur and is not always in the loop,” said Shamsun Nahar, a female member of the village council. The legal age of marriage is 18 years for girls and 21 years for boys. Paying or taking a dowry is a punishable offence.
Dilarpur residents and local journalists said the practices of paying dowries and under-age marriages have declined since Khaleda took office in 2001 for the second time in 10 years.
But the problems are so widespread, especially across the country’s northern half with its pockets of endemic poverty, that it will take many years to eradicate the scourge, they added.
Khadija’s father, Hafizur Rahman, died few years ago, leaving her to the care of her mother.
Both hope Khadija will some day be taken back by her husband when he has enough money to live separately from his parents.
“But I don’t know if it will remain a dream forever,” said Khadija, wearing a torn sari.
Many other young girls in Dilarpur tell similar tales of deprivation and shattered hopes.
Some already have one or two babies and worry more about feeding their children than themselves.
“They just come back, not formally divorced and with no responsibility shared by society,” said Azhar Ali, a senior villager. “We take it as a fait accompli.”
More than 70 per cent of Dilarpur’s nearly 4,000 residents live by working for landlords, and many face near starvation after floods washed away or damaged most crops, including rice paddies, said village council chairman Abdur Rahman Bakul.
Like Khadija, most of the girls forced back home said they suffered torture and humiliation because their parents were unable to pay promised dowry money to secure their marriage. Distraught parents agree.
“They asked for 25,000 taka as a dowry that was to be paid within three months after the wedding. But I could arrange only 7,000,” said Mohammad Shahidullah, the father of Bilkis Banu, 22.
“They beat me day after day for the money. I chased my parents ... but they are too poor. When it became unbearable, I came back,” said Bilkis, who looks older than her age.
Shahidullah said he did not expect to find Bilkis another groom and worries what will happen to her after he dies.
“I wonder who will support her. She has no brother to rely on. Her mother is old and sick,” he said.
Grinding poverty has forced villagers to accept both child marriages and dowries as unavoidable reality, village council chairman Bakul said.
“Poor parents feel marrying off their young girls will relieve some of their economic burden. The groom’s family demands a dowry to grab some cash that helps ease their poverty,” he said.
“Poverty traps both (families), but the worst victim is the girl, who has no real shelter.”
Nearly half of Bangladesh’s 140 million people live in poverty, according to official statistics. The government says it’s striving to halve that number by 2015, under the UN millennium development goal.
Uneducated young brides are unaware of their rights. Marriage to them means simply shifting homes, said Razia Khatun, 20, who wed at the age of 12 and lived with her husband for three years.
To get around the legal ban, dowries are usually negotiated behind the scene.
“What else could we do? Shall I keep my daughter unmarried for life?” said Razia’s father Jashim Pramanik.
“This is a sin.”
Women can also fall prey to husbands who are well off or wealthy but torture or even kill their wives over dowries or other family disputes, police and women rights groups say.
Bangladeshi laws stipulate a maximum penalty of death for the torture and killing of women, but many victims or their families prefer not to lodge a complaint to avoid more trouble.
For those who do, the justice process is often too slow.
Bilkis filed a case against her ex-husband three years ago, but is still waiting for the trial to begin.
