Tareen Rahman :
Over half of the women in villages of Bangladesh have misreported their age, complicating efforts to understand and address the problem of early marriage in the country, a survey conducted by ICDDR,B has revealed.
ICDDR,B’s Center for Population, Urbanization and Climate Change has conducted the survey on 1,766 women aged between 15 and 29 years in the Matlab region, asking them questions to do with age, schooling and marriage. Most of the women were married and of them more than two-thirds (63 per cent) misreported their age, Dr Kim Streatfield, Director of ICDDR,B told The New Nation on Monday.
“For the 20 to 24 years old women who are currently married, the reported average age of their marriage was 16.8 years, which is similar to national statistics documenting an average age of first marriage as 16.6 years for this age group,” he said. Dr. Kim said, “When we went through the women’s actual dates of birth as recorded in the Matlab demographic surveillance database, it was revealed that their true age at first marriage was 18.6 years — producing an average difference of almost two years between reported and actual ages at marriage.”
The Matlab demographic surveillance database offers a unique and important source of information for understanding early marriage because accurate dates of birth of women are known, making it possible to compare true ages at marriage with reported ages.
The ICDDR,B director further added several factors were also associated with the misreporting, including education and socio-economic status. For example, women with little or no schooling tended to misreport their age by 2.5 to 3.0 years, while those with high school education misreported by only one year.
Women from the poorest households underreported on an average by more than two years, while those in the richest households misreported by about one year. In addition, the older a single woman also under reported her actual age by five years.
He said the issue of dowry may also be important, since dowry demands of a bride’s family tend to increase with a women’s age and so families have an incentive to marry off their girls early while dowry is still relatively low.
Women whose families had paid dowry under-reported their ages at marriage by 1.64 years on average, compared to 0.55 years for women whose families had not paid dowry, which indicates the important role of dowry on misreporting of age at marriage, he said.
Dr. Kim said, “These findings on misreporting have important implications for research and understanding of early marriage. If under reporting is intentional, then it is a greater challenge to obtain accurate age data in national surveys like demographic health surveys.”
Early marriage — which limits educational achievement and has negative health implications for the mother and her children — is a concern globally and particularly in Bangladesh, which has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world.
The minimum legal age of marriage for females in Bangladesh is currently 18 years and 21 for males. ICCDR,B in collaboration with others has found the rate of child marriage (under 18 years of age) in Bangladesh to be 64 per cent of all women aged betweern 20 and 24.
