The Violence Is Not Our Culture Campaign is an initiative of Women Living Under Muslim Laws to eliminate all forms of 'culturally-justified' violence against women.
Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, with 20% of girls becoming wives before their 15th birthday, even though 18 is the minimum age allowed by law. Why?
"It is the new kind of slavery," says Mirna Ming Ming Evora, who's the country director for the NGO Plan International.
"Here girls are a burden, they don't earn income in this culture."
This 2010 articles explores some of the hardships and violence faced by child brides in Bangladesh: Rani is a child bride. Her story is common in Bangladesh, where as many as two-thirds of young girls are compelled to enter marriage at a young age. This practice is not limited to slums and rural villages. According to the United Nations State of the World’s Children, the rate of child marriage in Bangladesh is 64%; it affects 58% of girls in urban areas and 69% in rural areas.
NEW DELHI, Feb 10 - Scores of South Asian charities struggling to curb high child-marriage rates are backing a global movement spearheaded by South African peace icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu to end the practice affecting millions of girls and women worldwide.
Representatives from charities in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka gathered in New Delhi last week at the regional launch of the "Girls Not Brides" alliance – created by Tutu, 80, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for speaking out against white minority rule in South Africa.
Islamabad—Speakers at a conference here on Thursday urged for collective struggle and structural reforms to challenge Violence Against Women (VAW) in South Asian countries particularly. The three-day South Asian conference on “Reclaiming Space: from victimhood to agency: State and civil society response to VAW” organized by Rozan in Islamabad was widely attended by women activists from all over Pakistan who were joined by delegates from India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Report of the South Asia Plus Consultation on Culture, Women and Human RightsSeptember 2-3, 2010, Nepal With culture being such a contested terrain, particularly as it relates to equality claims of women and minorities, the development of cultural rights offers new understandings on culture and cultural diversity that reinforce the indivisibility of cultural rights with other human rights.
ICRW and its partners, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC) in Uganda and Hassan II University in Morocco, with support from UNFPA, undertook a three-country study in Bangladesh, Morocco and Uganda to estimate the economic costs of intimate partner violence at the household and community levels, where its impact is most direct and immediate. The focus on intimate partner violence was motivated by the fact that this is the most common form of violence against women.
Despite court orders, government has failed to intervene.
(Dhaka) - The Bangladesh government should take urgent measures to make sure that religious fatwas and traditional dispute resolution methods do not result in extrajudicial punishments, Human Rights Watch said today. The government is yet to act on repeated orders of the High Court Division of the Supreme Court, beginning in July 2010, to stop illegal punishments such as whipping, lashing, or public humiliations, said the petitioners who challenged the practice.
DHAKA, Apr 28, 2011 (IPS) - Bangladeshi women are pushing government to implement the recently approved National Women Development Policy (NWDP) 2011, which has met with strong resistance from Islamic clergy.
Leaders and activists of the Jatiya Mahila Sangstha (National Women’s Organisation) recently held rallies and formed human chains across major cities demanding the policy’s immediate enforcement.
