Marriage in Changing Family Pattern of Bangladesh: The Present Trends

Family, the basic unit of society, all over the world has been undergoing many fundamental changes and profound transformation due to comprehensive socio-economic development and technological advancement. This paper is a humble attempt to examine the factors affecting changes in family pattern, age at marriage, practice of dowry and divorce in family life of Bangladesh. The major factors affecting changes are expansion of educational and employment opportunities, introduction of advanced technologies in production sectors, increased access to development services like micro-finance, health, education, and social awareness avenues, economic and political empowerment among the family members including legal measures for protecting women and children from negative consequences of dowry practice and divorce, in particular. Still, several problems emerged from the changed family pattern in Bangladesh that included break-down of joint family system, degradation of moral values, negligence toward the dependent and aged members, wide practice dowry and divorce, increase in new demands of the family members, development of self-centered attitude, and increased conflict in conjugal as well as family life. On the basis of above findings and discussions, some specific measures may be suggested as intervention strategies for solving the problems emerged from the changed family pattern in Bangladesh including the practice of dowry and divorce. These measures are: counseling by the trained social workers, legal literacy and social education relating to family-life, women empowerment, new employment creation, strengthening health care services at grassroots, proper enforcement of family, child and marriage related laws. The role of mass media should be encouraged in raising awareness among community people and government functionaries including the law enforcement agencies so that they should come forward to improve their life situation in accordance with the changes in family pattern of Bangladesh. Finally, in a changing society of Bangladesh, professionally skilled and trained social workers can greatly contribute to make all the social efforts and human service activities more effective and meaningful.