Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning into the Nonprofits again for our second episode this week. Tonight is Wednesday, February twelfth, and we had a fun recording the other day on Monday. But this topic that we're going to talk about is a little bit more somber, a little bit more serious, and so I'm just going to get right into it with a quote that I think sums up the entire situation that's happening in Bangladesh. And so we are going to discuss an article tonight called they marry off Girls
because they are a burden. The Battle to save Bangladesh's child Brides from Telegraph by Tom Parry on January twentieth, twenty twenty five. In order to introduce this article, I want to actually read kind of a long quote from another article from twenty eighteen, also from the Telegraph, and this is on child marriage and sex trafficking in Bangladesh by Corin Redfern. It's been five years since Ruper was trafficked into the brothel. Married at eleven years old to
a man in his thirties who she'd never met. She spent her wedding day playing hide and seek with her cousin in the mud. I ripped off pieces of my sorry to make little wedding dresses for my dolls. She remembers, when my husband raped me that night, I didn't understand what was happening. I only felt pain. She felt pregnant shortly after, but when her husband was killed in an accident at work, her family refused to take her back. They said they couldn't afford to look after me or
my son. I wasn't a virgin anymore, so no man would marry me. Hungary and alone, the then thirteen year old took a train to Dhaka in the hopes of finding work in a garment factory. A woman saw me crying at the station and said she had a friend who was looking for a maid. Rupa says, I followed her home, but she sold me here instead. And of course this excerpt was taken in an interview with this
young girl at a brothel in Bangladesh. And you know, I just want to say that like many poor and orthodox religious countries, this is common, unfortunately, and young girls, particularly women in general, are devalued. We see it in Christianity. There's evidence for it throughout the Bible. There's evidence for it culturally whether you look at Mormons or just basic texts stating that women can't you be in the church, or can't be vocal in church, they can't teach men,
they can't lead and in many cases work. And so we see that across the world, but particularly in Bangladesh. They are incredibly poor, a ninety one percent Muslim country, and they're just living with a lot of turmoil. And of course the females, the younger they get, are the ones that bear the brunt of such atrocity. And so with that being said, I want to go to Helen, and Helen, I want to ask you, what are the key factors that lead to child marriage, particularly with girls?
So guess what, everybody's misogyny. But also as well, one thing about this article that I appreciate that they did talk about the education that they're trying to provide to these girls and the hopes that they have for a better future, because these are young children. These are like if you're a parent, imagining your twelve year old daughter having to choose between having dreams of a future versus
being forced into a marriage. And there was also mention in the article about parents that didn't want their children to be sold into these child marriages, and they had hopes for their own children, and there were programs that were brought in for these kids.
To get educations.
But the thing is, though, is that these incidents in Bagladesh are rare.
This is not the norm.
The norm is that these girls are going to be sold into marriage. And because it's not so much it's a burden, Like I think there's some genuinely good parents there, but because of lack of economic opportunity, lack of education, and sort of the religious upbringing that you now, girls and women are second classicizens. Even if they have the
best intentions, they're kind of forced into these situations. There have been situations like in Romania where girls were sold into sexual slavery, not because the parents really wanted them to be sold into sexual slavery. It was because they were dirt poor and had no other option. So these are the and it sounds cruel and it is. It's
cruel for parents to have to make these decisions. But when you're when push comes to shove and you're so desperate that you have to make these really terrible, horrible decisions. And I'm not excusing this, keep this in mind, but I can understand why it happens, and I just want to point out I'll talk about this later about all about the child brides that have in here, So that's another conversation we can have.
So I'm not passing the book. I'm just saying that these this is a very not only.
Religious problem, but this seems to be also problem of lack of education, lack of economic opportunity as well, not just religion.
And it's funny the way that those feed off of each other. I mean, if you look in our country, lack of education and poor surroundings and and highly religion are also highly religious. It seems to be a formula that can't be broken. I would disagree with you, but not necessarily with you. I would just say that there is certainly a cultural difference because I don't. I would never sell one of my children, no matter how bad things got, right, I would I have a daughter. I
would never do that. I would die before that happened. I would starve to death before that happened. These folks don't, and it's probably due to the poor education, but also the kind of infiltration of religion where that education doesn't exist, and thus victimizing generation after generation.
So you know, I.
Would, I would. I would have to argue with anybody who thought that that was a good alternative, you know why that they might think that. Anyway, I digress a little bit. Aj, I want to go to you. You brought up a really good point leading up to this article, and that is, you know that the article largely focuses on young girls. But what are we not getting There's a larger point here.
Yeah, I mean, we don't want to take away from the tragedy that these young girls are going through, right, But the article does point out something that's usually not talk about, and that's the fact that boys are also being married off. When we think of child rides, we always think, oh, you know, this is an adult man that is already said wele that is like buying a little child girl to do whatever he wants with her.
But in the cases of places like Bangladesh, is it's a little bit different because everybody is in the same poverty level, So the boys and the girls are at the same poverty level. And it seems that the article explained that the boys have to leave school early to help families to cover the cost of rebuilding after natural disasters. They have a lot of cyclones in the area, so there is a lot of flooding. The islands at are very very close to the sea level, so it floats
extremely easy. They lose their homes, you know, seasonally, so the children have to go to work and they have to leave school. That's one of the reasons that they stop going and getting their education.
You know.
Obviously this happens before they turn they turn of age, that they turn eighteen, So you have all of these young boys that left school early that are being married to girls that are just slightly a little bit younger. So it can be like a you know, twelve thirteen year old girl marrying enough to like a fourteen or fifteen year old boy. So it's not like an extreme age difference, but it's still not right. It's you have you have children being married off to children, Yes, you have, you.
I do, I see that. I see that point. It's important to recognize that all children are in danger here and it is due to this. In my opinion, it's due to this cycle of kind of never ending poverty, never ending opportunity, and it's just you know, kind of perpetual rob I want to go to you, is there anything that could be done to fix this?
So the article starts by talking a lot about child marriage and then it pivots a lot into the education and how they're trying to help, especially the girls. I think predominantly the girls become educated, which I think is the cool part because there's really only a couple of ways that this can solve out, right, Like, there are other organizations, perhaps even countries or whatever else. I could come in and change it, but that's not a great solution.
But really that through the means of education. What I like about it is like, teach the girls that they have value. Teach the girls that they can continue to accrue value through skills and education whatever else they might
be interested in. And then the article has a quotes from a couple of them that like they want to grow up and being doctor and stuff like that, So like leave go Like that might be hard, but if you think of this population, and this is gonna sound cool, if you just think of the population more as just
like an organism. Over time it should be able to have individuals and then the organim as a whole evolve into we're gonna go out and we're gonna do stuff, and by teaching the girls that they and themselves have value, each generation of educated child should be able to do a little bit better than the previous one. So then by doing that they can basically allow them to get pissed off and then not be happy with the status quo.
Yeah, you know the I really thought it was a great idea, and I think Helen brought this up before or at least started going down that road, but that there were programs in place that actually paid families to have their kids stay in school because they lose their kids due to poverty, whether it's their daughters being married off, and like I heard, like we listed in the intro, you know, they do end up in either being abused
or even married too much older men. Even though the other child, other boys are being married out, the girls are I think the ones that are susceptible to sexual abuse. And that's that's really what the worst case scenario I think is for these children. But yeah, paying parents to keep them in school and paying parents to have their kids, you know, learn and make something of themselves instead of having to get rid of them. I want to read some statistics that I have here, and so I'm going
to speak to a typo. You guys have seen my notes. I wrote that sixteen percent of families are practicing child marriage. Actually sixty, it's sixty I wrote that backwards, but it's sixty percent. Are also living in rural areas, So I thought that was interesting that the rural and the number of child marriages are kind of coinciding. Fifty six percent of girls are married before completing high school excuse me
high school. And in one survey three hundred and seventy five sex of three hundred and seventy five sex workers across four brothels, forty seven percent were child brides trafficked at the prostitution against their will. It's it's so horrible, but these are numbers that we need to kind of push out there and make sure everybody understands Helen, you had some statistics of your own and some numbers, some data that you wanted to share, and I found that
they were really interesting. So if you will please enlighten us.
So because I want people to understand that this doesn't happen in just like a microcosm, like this is something that's happening throughout the world, and that though we're talking about what's happening in Bagladesh.
This happens here. There's thirty seven states that still do.
This practice, which is mind mooweling when you think about it. So I pulled up statistics by the Koski Hymen study. This was a study that was done in the mid twenty tens, and basically this was this was the these are the averages about ten years ago. It just a little bit of like, you know, something to kind of
think about. For example, in Texas, from twenty twenty fourteen, almost forty thousand children were married, and FIDA sixteen thousand, sixteen thousand, four hundred children, some as young as thirteen years old, were married from two thousand to twenty seventeen, which is the second highest incidence of child marriage after Texas. In Alabama, there were over eighty six hundred child marriages from two thousand to twenty fifteen, the fourth highest amount
of any state. However, child marriage in Alabama showed a large decline in that time. In twenty almost twelve hundred children are married, but dropped to one ninety by twenty fourteen. In Virginia, between twenty four and twenty thirteen, nearly forty five hundred children were married to Tara Justice Center in Ohio. From twoentand to twenty fifteen, there were four four hundred and forty girls married age seventeen and younger, including forty
three age fifteen and under. In New York, more than thirty eight hundred children were married between two thousand and twenty ten, and koske Say also found that only twenty percent of married children were living with their spouses. The majority rest were still living with their parents. So the parents like, they're still living with at home, you know, those children, but the parents are still you know, agreeing for.
Them to enter these marriages.
And most of this comes from religious families that are marrying their children, are allowing their children to be married.
This is not happening.
And communities where kids get access to economic growth and they also have the ability to have you know, have the mobility upwards. Now we under like, you know, we can think of the Mormon religion, we can think of other religions that are kind of okay with your children being kind of married off.
I think it's gross.
But this comes from if even if you're broad religious, like I was broad religious, my parents would never think that I should get married at fourteen years old.
They were like, you.
Need to you need to grow up, you need to go to school, you need to get education. So this is not just a symptom of religion, it's also the society factors that goes around it.
And I think that's being taught.
Yeah, yeah, right, And that's what I was kind of alluding to, this perfect storm of poverty and of a lack of education where religion is able to kind of sink its hooks in and provide something, but then you know, it ends up, it ends up giving you the worst case scenarios. And speaking of scenarios, Age, you know, you had some solutions highlighted coming into tonight's recording, and I just wanted to kind of talk to you about that and some of the laws that have been passed in
Bangladesh to try and protect kids. Yeah.
I think Rob had a comment maybe possibly.
Jump I'm so bad at my job.
Please please show I don't try to jump in before you ag every time. That's not on purpose. I was going to say, between Jimmy and Helen, Yeah, correlation not causation. But boy, howdy, isn't it convenient that every single study shows that the poorer you are and the less educated you are, therefore the more religious you are. And then when it comes to this, yes, not all religious people marry off their their daughters, because let's face it, we're
talking about the daughters. Not every religious person marries off their daughters. We know this to be true because we have at least one person. But also most people don't do that in America, but it still does occur. So I think it's worse than that, right, because it's not just you have to be poor and educated to be likely to be religious, and then you need to have the very bad religion that makes you feel that women
are literal property. That thus, this is a transaction. That's the problem is it's the transactional component to it, really.
And I think the state of Bangladesh realizes that the transaction is the solution that people are looking for. And since Aj graciously yielded her time to the man on the on my screen bottom right, uh, but also to my to my left, if you're if you're watching, if you're watching us, now, I want to go back to Aj and say, hey, Aj, what what is the Bangladeshi already doing?
So there it seems to be like a huge, huge focus on education.
Anyway.
Yeah, it seems like education is the key here because with all the work that they have done, the enrollment rates have gone way up. I think I said about to about ninety percent enrollment wight, So it's a huge, huge difference from the nineteen eighties when it was like around forty percent. So their work is working, and it seems that the solution is focusing on keeping them in school.
One of the things that you mentioned the onlier on was that they're paying families, but basically they've give them a little bit of money to make sure that they keep their kids in school. And as I also mentioned, the reason that they were dropping out of school was because they're having to go to work to cover for the cost you know, after a natural disaster, rebuilding homes
and all of that. So if they have that extra money from these organizations, then they're going to have they're going to be able to cover that that recovery effort without having to take their kids out of school. So that's an excellent solution right there. Another thing they're doing is they build out of these really really small schools. They're like a one classroom type of schools, but they're all over they have about sixty four thousand schools and
one point eight million students. So this means that the kids can walk to school. They don't need to have any type of transportation. So access access to the school is so important because if they have to drive or walk a whole hour, then they're not going to go there. Right when I was a kid growing up, I had to walk like about forty five minutes to an hour to the only school that we had around.
We did it every day.
You know, if it was raining then you know, we couldn't make it. But so having these schools within like ten minutes to where they can just go back and forth accellent. Keeping them motivated, like giving them things to look forward to. There were some of the kids in the auticle that said they wanted to be teacher, another one wanted to be a doctor, another one wanted to
be a soldier. So like giving these kids dreams and you know, something to be like, hey I can work, that I can be that I can do better than you know, just being I'm not saying that it's want to be a farmer, but like their in their poverty stricken areas, being a farmer, it does not bring any type of money that is going to take them anywhere.
Especially when sixty percent of your economy or sixty percent of your populace is agricultural. You're competing every day, you know, to try and make a living, especially if you consider all of the imports that the country can take from agriculture happening around the world. You know, there's you pretty much can only sustain yourself. I was looking into I
did a little bit of research on dowries. I was interested in seeing how the dowry affected Bangladesh because I know that people would you know, when you marry off your daughter, you collect the dowry from the groom's husband
excuse me, the groom's family. The bride's family collects a dowry right a cash payment or maybe some kind of economic bump into in the form of maybe livestock or or who knows, but that has been outlawed in Bangladesh, and I wanted to see what you guys thought about that and what you think the impacts of that might be.
Rob go ahead really quick, I think you have that backwards. It's the wife brings the dowry to the husband. Yes, yeah, well yes, because the wife doesn't have value. Remember why, So you're interesting money or property or money brought by a bride to the husband because you are giving them support for taking your woman, and the woman does not have value?
Wordless?
Okay, I think I think.
The dowry is not allowed, but it's not practiced in Bangladesh as a mandatory obligation society. I thought that it was different in Bangladesh.
It could be very true, and I could just be messing everything up.
Okay, So I will tell you this though, So let's all right, So so I will I will admit, I will admit wrongdoing so that I'm not I don't want to just sit here and start researching because I may very well have gotten that backwards. But with okay, so poverty in poverty stricken areas, does it even make a difference to eliminate that?
I think it's a good question. Yeah.
I mean, nobody's got the money to pay it anyway, right, So really, the government taking this approach to say, hey, dowries will not be allowed, well, it doesn't really do anything for the children, because no, it only really would affect the middle class who they're not struggling to make or receive payment anyway. Uh, and so the problem stays in the impoverished area. Anyway, I thought that that was interesting and I wanted to kind of get your guys take.
I guess as we wrap up the show about you know, what will work and what will not work in preventing or reversing this kind of cultural mindset. So I'm gonna go down the line.
I'm gonna go.
Actually, I'm gonna go, Helen rob Aj. So, Helen, what do you think? I mean, where where do we go from here in Bangladesh?
Well, I'm hoping, like because as agents point pointed out about the more children and gaining access to education, that it's it's.
Going to be slow. It always is.
There's not going to be tomorrow we're going to find out that you know, all the girls heavy go opportunity and.
You know they're they're all gonna be.
Well educated and blah blah blah, because it's like that's that's a pipe dream.
But slow incremental changes over time.
The fact that you know, Bangladesh has allowed allowed a dowry even though it's so practiced and you know and illegally in certain areas of Bagladesh, that it's still going to happen, but because you know, you can change the law, but it taints longer to change mind.
But I'm hoping the.
More exposure to these children have to educations, the more that they have dreams that down the line, we're going to see, you know, child growth. You know, I might not completely go away, but the statistics will go down.
As these kids.
Get older and they were for these opportunities and they become parents, you know that they're going to want the same thing for their children.
That's what I hope for. It's going to be slow, it's going to be hard, but that's.
The type of things that we can look forward to when like we're looking at the story and the microcousm that is.
Now that down the line that they'll they'll be changed.
Yeah, hence the organism I think representation that Rob was talking about before. So Rob, go ahead, Uh, you know, where what do we do? Now?
Where does where does Bangladesh go? I think they just keep doing this to be honest, Like there's a reason why we do free lunches in America, and right we should keep doing free lunches in America. So it's just useful for parents for schools to offer a lunch or a stipend, because now you're being rewarded for the education.
So in the short term, it's good to reward just getting them into the education, because the education is going to allow long term the children to have the audacity to have ambition, and then they will become unrestful, which is what when I want.
Yeah, yeah, aj Yeah, I think that the dowry thing is pretty useless really. I mean, there's not like anybody is out there, you know, publicizing that they're going to marry their child and that they're you know, giving a dowry.
With the child.
Like it's just they can just relabel it as a gift and still do it, you know. So, But so I think focusing on the education aspect is what's working and what should continue to be done.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so too. I think they're they're making small gains and they should probably just keep working in that direction. I hope that, uh, you know, the government upholds this and you know, we just find a way out of this. By the way, Rob, you were correct, so I misread that. But yeah, the dowry. The dowry is of course a payment from the from the bride's family to the grooms, and I am glad that you brought up three Larnches in America because they
Saturday folks don't forget to tune into the nonprofits. Same time, same place, we are going to be talking about a congressman who thinks that school age kids should get a job if they want to eat at school. In any case, if you want to hear more about some of this crazy stuff that we're seeing out in the world at the hands of religion,