Why is child marriage still a thing?

My mother was married at fifteen in the 70s. Has women and girls' lives improved since then?

It’s Mama Chowdhury’s birthday this week! Ten years ago, I wrote about her journey as a child bride in an essay for Refinery29. She has and continues to serve as my creative muse and the reason why I became a journalist. Below is an updated and repurposed version.

Young girls on a beach in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh in 2018

For decades, Bangladesh has had one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world. According to Human Rights Watch, it consistently ranks first globally for the number of child brides under age 15.

“Given how much success some other countries have had at bringing down the rate of child marriage and the increased attention globally to the harms caused by child marriage, Bangladesh’s progress on this issue is disappointing,” Heather Barr, then a senior researcher on women’s rights at Human Rights Watch, told me when I reported on the issue in 2015.

Child marriage has technically been illegal in Bangladesh since 1929, but the law is rarely enforced. “In our research, we've never witnessed or heard through second-hand sources of anyone ever being arrested or prosecuted for arranging or performing a child marriage,” Barr said.

The drivers are layered. Poverty plays a central role, but so do social pressure, sexual harassment, and political instability. Families often see marriage as the surest protection for a girl’s reputation.

My mother was one of those girls. She was 15 when her parents married her off in 1979. Poverty wasn’t the reason—it was patriarchal social norms and political instability. She had grown up in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, living what she describes as a modern life. She was athletic, outspoken, and several grades ahead in school. She wore bell-bottoms instead of saris, listened to pop songs on the radio, and dreamt of traveling abroad. By every measure, she had promise. But promise meant little in a system where a girl’s future was measured by marriage.

The year she became a bride, Bangladesh was barely eight years old, still reeling from a famine and a violent war for independence that left a deep imprint on how women and girls were viewed. During the 1971 war, the Pakistani army raped thousands of Bangladeshi women—a trauma that reinforced rigid ideas of female purity and protection. By the late 1970s, those ideas still dominated. Sexual harassment remained pervasive, and parents often believed that marrying off a daughter was the best way to protect her—and the family’s reputation.

My mother’s road to an arranged marriage began when one of my father’s older brothers noticed her walking home from school. My father, then an undocumented migrant in Germany, never saw his bride before the wedding. Instead, my grandfather and uncles arranged it over the telephone, with an imam officiating from afar. A simple “yes” whispered into the receiver was enough to bind two strangers together for life.

A few months later, just shy of her 16th birthday, my mother boarded a plane for the first time and flew alone to meet her husband. She didn’t speak German and barely knew English. My parents, as different as night and day, would never have chosen each other. Yet their union was sealed, and soon after they immigrated to the United States, where they raised two daughters in Queens.

My mother’s ambitions ended at 15, but she made sure ours didn’t. She was a strict parent, unyielding in her belief that education would be our salvation. My aunt sometimes teased her that my sister and I had no domestic skills—not even making our own beds. My mother always brushed it off, “they’ll have plenty of time to learn that later. Their job now is to study.” Education was her obsession, the one way she could ensure we achieved what she never had.

But education was never the only expectation. My mother also imagined a predictable arc for our futures: advanced degrees, respectable jobs, Bangladeshi-American husbands, a suburban house with a lawn, and two or three children. It was not an unusual dream for an immigrant parent. But it was a world apart from her own experience of early marriage and blue-collar labor in America. Her vision for us was uncompromising, and so was her disappointment when I chose a different path. I married at 36, divorced at 41, and now I’m raising two daughters of my own. For them, and for me, the timeline is no longer dictated by survival or social pressure.

Still, I know I am one of the lucky ones. My mother’s life was set in motion at 15, part of a practice that continues today: more than half of Bangladeshi girls are still married before adulthood. Across the globe, millions of girls face similar constraints, their opportunities curtailed by laws that exist only on paper, by social norms that prioritize marriage over education, and by violence or instability that makes survival a daily negotiation. In the United States, the rollback of reproductive rights has left many women and girls without access to essential healthcare. In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s return to power has systematically barred girls from secondary education and severely restricted women’s participation in public life. In Sudan, ongoing conflict has increased gender-based violence and limited women’s access to education and healthcare. And in Palestine, women and girls, when not being killed by Israeli air strikes, lack access to basic menstrual products and prenatal care.

Yet the struggle for girls’ rights remains urgent. My mother’s story is a reminder that progress is fragile—and that defending the freedom of women and girls requires constant attention, everywhere.