Academic Paper from the year 2019 in the subject Social Work, grade: 1.7, Protestant University of Applied Sciences Ludwigsburg, course: Gender and Social Development, language: English, abstract: In this paper I want to take a closer look at Bangladesh in particular, and look at the laws that are made considering child marriage, the causes and consequences of child marriage. I want to get a better understanding of the cultural reasons and the problems of the country that lead to this. Furthermore I will look at the views and attitude of the people affected by this, and look at all the possibilities as to what needs to be changed, how we can help and how it is important for social work. Child marriage is very common today and it undeniably has a lot of negative affects. Of course, in most of these countries the practise of child marriage is prohibited. Unfortunately, these laws often do not have a big impact. The lack of impact of these laws are highly related to cultural and religious traditions. It is mostly common in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean, East Asia and the Pacific, and finally Europe and Central Asia. Out of all of these regions, Bangladesh with 65%, has the second highest rate of child marriage after Niger.

Ending child marriage is not only a moral imperative—it is a strategic imperative that will further critical U.S. foreign policy interests in development, prosperity, stability, and the rule of law.

One-third of the world's girls are married before the age of eighteen, limiting both their educational and economic potential. Child marriage is damaging to global prosperity and stability, yet despite the urgency of the issue, there remains a significant lack of data on the subject. Senior Fellow Gayle Tzemach Lemmon discusses both the factors that contribute to and strategies that have proved effective against child marriage.

Bias analysis quantifies the influence of systematic error on an epidemiology study’s estimate of association. The fundamental methods of bias analysis in epi- miology have been well described for decades, yet are seldom applied in published presentations of epidemiologic research. More recent advances in bias analysis, such as probabilistic bias analysis, appear even more rarely. We suspect that there are both supply-side and demand-side explanations for the scarcity of bias analysis. On the demand side, journal reviewers and editors seldom request that authors address systematic error aside from listing them as limitations of their particular study. This listing is often accompanied by explanations for why the limitations should not pose much concern. On the supply side, methods for bias analysis receive little attention in most epidemiology curriculums, are often scattered throughout textbooks or absent from them altogether, and cannot be implemented easily using standard statistical computing software. Our objective in this text is to reduce these supply-side barriers, with the hope that demand for quantitative bias analysis will follow.

Child marriage is prevalent in South Asia, as it is estimated there are 285 million child brides. At present 59% of women aged 20–24 in Bangladesh were married under the age of 18, 40% in Nepal and 27 % in India. Child marriage is regarded as one of the harmful traditional practice existing in Nepal since time immemorial. Nepal aims to end child marriage by 2030 as part of its commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, the government of Nepal has already sanctioned a national strategy that provides an overarching framework to end child marriage. At the meantime, the criminal law of Nepal considers child marriage as a crime and punishes the person who perform or cause to perform child marriage. This research is a part of this consortium project which was commissioned by Women Rehabilitation Center along with International Women’s Rights Action Watch – Asia Pacific (IWRAW-AP) and other South Asian organizations for South Asian Initiative on FIRE from July 2019 to October 2020. Also, the data collection and the law review for the research report has been conducted from March 2020 to October 2020. This report aims to find out the changing trend of child marriage like either forced or self-initiated or other forms. Further, it also endeavors to understand the deep-rooted causes of the child marriage and its interconnectedness with the impacts it create to the girls and boys at different levels of their livelihood, family relations, reproductive health and legal consequences from adolescent perspectives. Finally, this report focuses on to revisit the laws on absolute criminalization of the child marriage and its effectiveness on controlling the agencies, decision making and choice of adolescents regarding marriage.