71
from abscesses and diabetes and is too
sick to work. In desperation, Tajul turned
to Rafi. “It wasn’t the plan, but the situ-
ation became really bad,” Rekha recalls.
Rekha had never imagined she
would be sending her son to work
12-hour days at a glass factory. “But
now we are living a devastated life,”
she says, gesturing around the bare
concrete room where the whole family
eats and sleeps.
When the pandemic first hit, con-
cern initially focused on girls being
forced into marriage, as struggling
families tried to reduce their costs by
marrying off their daughters to men
sometimes more than twice their age.
One survey conducted by the nonprofit
Manusher Jonno Foundation recorded
almost 14,000 underage marriages
across one-third of the country during
the first six months of lockdown, with△
A classroom at Shantipur
High School in Dhaka sits empty
on Dec. 2