At 11, she married Shakib Mia, a 20-year-old man she had met on Facebook. No one stopped that wedding in Hazaribagh, Dhaka. By 13, she was already the mother of a child.
When the baby turned 7 months old, her husband and mother-in-law threw her out of the family home and kept the child. A teenager, without a job or independence, had to knock on the door of the Dhaka Legal Aid Office to ask for her own child to be returned to her.
On Tuesday, Judge Md Sayem Khan ruled in her favor: the baby had to be returned to his mother. The custody is temporary, while the Family Court decides the final case, and she was given a condition in the meantime: she must not use Facebook or TikTok. The same social network through which everything began is now prohibited to her.
