Report on Early Marriage

Open with the scale of the practice and where it is most common, then the reasons families give, the consequences for a girl's health and education, what the law says, and what campaigners are doing. A social report should quote someone affected, because the human detail is what distinguishes it from an essay.

The question: Write a report on early marriage in rural Bangladesh.

The format

Report an intervention, not the practice

Open with what a committee, a school or an administration has done and how many cases it covered. The practice itself is background; the intervention is the news.

• Give a number and a period.
• Name the upazila and the body involved.
• 🚨 Without an intervention this becomes an essay.

Give the families' reasoning, attributed

The second paragraph reports why families do it — poverty, security, the school holidays — as what committee members say, not as your own analysis.

• Give an age range.
• The holiday detail is specific and rarely used.

Law, then the follow-up

One sentence on what the law provides, then what happens after a marriage is stopped. Whether the girls returned to school is the most reportable fact in the story.

• Do not cite the act and year from memory.
• ⚠️ Quote a teacher or committee member, not a family.

Model answer

Model answer (about 205 words)

Union team stops 14 child marriages in six months

Our Correspondent

Netrokona, 5 September: A local committee working with the union parishad in Kalmakanda upazila has intervened to stop fourteen child marriages in the past six months, members said on Thursday, adding that most cases came to their attention only days before the ceremony.

Committee members said the marriages involved girls between fourteen and seventeen, and that families in almost every case cited poverty and concerns about security as their reasons. Several families had arranged the marriage during the school holidays, when a girl's absence from class would not be noticed.

"They do not think of it as breaking the law," said a member of the committee who teaches at a local school. "They think of it as settling a daughter safely."

Under Bangladeshi law marriage below eighteen for women is prohibited. Committee members said prosecutions were rare because families and marriage registrars usually cooperated once a marriage was stopped, and that the more difficult task was ensuring the girl returned to school afterwards. Of the fourteen cases, they said, eleven girls had resumed classes.

What earns and loses marks

• Report the follow-up. “Eleven of the fourteen resumed classes” is the detail that turns a report about stopping marriages into a report about whether stopping them works.
• Put the numbers in the first sentence. A news report leads with how many, where and when; anything else in the opening line is an essay opening in disguise.
• 🚨 Keep yourself out of it. “We should all be careful on the roads” is a sentence from a composition and loses the register mark immediately.
• Attribute every claim you could not have witnessed. Unattributed figures are the clearest sign of an invented report.
• About 180 to 220 words in four short paragraphs is the right length; newspaper paragraphs are short by convention.