DOI: https://doi.org/10.9790/0837-2208012836

Source: iosrjournals.org/F2208012836.pdf

Child marriage is a crucial social issue of Bangladesh. At present, Bangladesh is the fifth highest country of child marriage in the world while 18 percent of girls got married before age of 15 and 52 percent before age of 18. Bangladesh child marriage act prescribes that the minimum age of marriage were 18 years for women and 21 years for men. According to the present act, child marriage is legally prohibited in Bangladesh. Bangladesh government has taken several initiatives for reducing the rate of child marriage but it is not decreasing at the satisfactory level in Bangladesh. Despite sign of progress, some contemporary factors have arisen that are encouraging the child marriage in Bangladesh. To find out the contemporary factors for child marriage in Bangladesh are the main objectives of the study. The findings of the study may help to the concerned line agencies to develop such policy to minimize the rate of child marriage in Bangladesh. Survey and interview research techniques were used for data collection for this study. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. Descriptive statistics were used to give details about the child marriage in addition to inferential statistics such as Factor analysis was used to identify the factors and the level of influence of identified individual factors in child marriage of Bangladesh. Multiple regression analysis was used to show that the relationship between identified factors and child marriage. Findings demonstrate that there are nine factors are encouraging the child marriage. The identified factors are Marriage without registration and corruption of local marriage registrar, Lack of social security for female child and greediness of dowry of male child parents, Lack of administrative restriction and monitoring of local government administration, Gender inequality and influences of patriarchal society, Afraid of admeasure for female child and poverty, Political influences of local government representatives and ineffective existing law, Tampering of age from birth registration index, Late marriage registration and absence of judicial punishment, Illiteracy and lack of awareness, and Lack of awareness and applying of child marriage act. Multiple Regression Analysis illustrates that the identified factors are significantly related to the child marriage. This study suggests that if there is a changed in identified factors, there will be changed in the present scenario of child marriage in Bangladesh.

Keywords: Bangladesh, Child Marriage, Contemporary Factors, Statistical Analysis.

Dates:
Submitted: 15-07-2017
Accepted: 28-07-2017