Child marriage in Bangladesh

It’s harrowing from the very first frames. The screen opens to an adolescent girl, clad in her school clothes and pigtails, a hint of sadness in her off-camera gaze. Seconds later, it cuts to her sobbing at her parents’ feet, swathed in full bridal garb. The scene becomes even more jarring when we are struck with a number of subsequent realizations—these shots were filmed a day apart. What we’re watching isn’t role-play. And the girl, 13-year-old Beezly Roy, isn’t an anomaly—she’s an example of the all-too-common custom of child marriage in her community, a tradition journalist Tania Rashid explores in “Too Young to Wed: Child Marriage in Bangladesh,” the latest documentary short from Al Jazeera’s 101 East program.

Over the next 25 minutes, we become privy to the events that unfold between those two opening shots, after Beezly’s final day at school until her wedding to Shyamal, a man 12 years her senior. We learn that she has agreed to the arrangement on the sole condition of being allowed by her husband to continue her studies afterwards, that she dreams of “helping people” and “being someone big” one day, that she has had not time to tell her friends of her marriage. As her family makes preparations for the wedding meal, her bridal attire, and the myriad rituals that will accompany the Hindu ceremony, Beezly confides in Rashid that she dreads leaving her parents’ home.

“What can I do? They are forcing me,” she resigns. Indeed, everything is forced, from the unyielding white bangles squeezed painfully onto her wrists to symbolize her impending marital bond, to the very stranger she is promised by her family to spend the rest of her life with. But she stays resolutely stoic, a hollow stare accompanying her dutiful yet mechanical movements, until the time comes to leave with Shyamal, and she finally breaks down. For Beezly, an occasion so many would mark with excitement, joy, and most of all, love, is marred by sadness.

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