When schools reopened after COVID-related closures, many teen girls did not come back.

Jesmin Papri - Satkhira, Bangladesh

Anna Khatun was playing with friends outside when her parents interrupted the children and ushered the girl to her relatives’ house.

They had arranged for Anna to be married. She was only 13 years old.

“Everything happened so suddenly. I was not prepared for it,” Khatun, from Satkhira district in southwestern Bangladesh, recalled.

“Now I am fourteen and a mother of a child,” she told BenarNews.

The number of child marriages is increasing in Bangladesh’s disaster-prone southwestern coastal belt as a result of poverty and a worsening economy due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Satkhira, one of the areas in the country hardest hit by climate change, is seeing many marriages among children.

Official data shows that 1,214 child marriages were recorded in Shyamnagar, a sub-district of Satkhira, when schools were closed during the first year of the viral outbreak in 2020, but human rights activists say the actual number was much higher.

According to the local education office, those married were grade 6 to 10 students, aged 12 to 16. As many as 703 were from public schools, and the remaining 511 were from Islamic schools, or madrassas.

At the local Paranpur A. Rauf Memorial School and College, there were no records of child marriages on the government’s list.

But one teacher there, who asked to remain anonymous because she was not authorized to talk to reporters, told BenarNews that 24 students below the age of 16 were married off during the campus closure.

“After our school reopened, ten of our classmates were absent because they were married off during the pandemic. But I want to continue with my studies,” said Prema Mondol, a tenth-grader from Koyra, a sub-district in neighboring Khulna district.

In Bangladesh, it is illegal for girls to marry before 18 and boys to marry before 21.

However, the South Asian country is among the top 10 in the world for child marriage. Fifty-one percent of girls get married before the age of 18, while nearly 18 percent are wed before they turn 15, a 2019 survey by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics found.

Early marriage is not new

Anna’s wedding at 13 was not a new experience for her family.

All three of her sisters were also married off at a very young age.

“We are very poor. Continuing the studies for our child is not possible for us. We arranged the wedding as we got a proposal from a financially solvent family,” their mother, Hasina Begum, told BenarNews.

The pandemic, which created 2.45 million new poor people in the country, according to government data, has increased the likelihood of child marriage and child labor due to worsened economic insecurity and prolonged school closures.

“There are no unmarried girls aged over 14 in my localities as most parents are arranging marriages for their girls for various reasons,” said G.M. Masud Alam, chairman of the Gabura Union Council of Shyamnagar Upazila.

The local administration and public representatives are working to stop child marriage, he said.

Babita Parvin, a health worker in the village, said many child marriages were taking place in the area.

“Girls become mothers at a young age. They suffer from malnutrition and face various crises due to early pregnancy,” she said.

According to data from a Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey conducted in 2007, the rate of early marriage is highest at 75 percent in Khulna, the division that encompasses Satkhira.

One of the main reasons for increasing early marriages in the coastal belt is the fear that girls lose their “reproductive capacity” later in life, specifically in Satkhira and the neighboring Khulna district, community health workers and villagers said.

“Most of the dropout girls of our schools are due to child marriage. Most girls are not allowed to continue their studies after marriage,” said Abdur Rahman, a teacher at Gabura APG Alim Madrassa.

‘A burden’

According to villagers and local leaders, impacts from the changing climate and natural disasters are playing a role in child marriages because parents want to free themselves of having to take care of their daughters during times of crisis.

“Cyclone Amphan [2020] damaged many properties and land in this area. People here are normally poor, and the impact of climate change made them poorer,” said Gopal Chandra, a teacher at the Shailokhali Madinatul Ulum Kamil Madrassa.

“Parents treat their girls as a burden. As a result, the number of child marriages is increasing.”

Ahsan Uddin Ahmed, an expert on the impact of climate change on social issues, accused the government of failing to prevent child marriage, especially among “the poor families who consider girls as a burden.”

The government should provide financial support for poor families under the social safety-net programs, he said, so that they are not considered a burden and married off early.

Christine Klauth of UNICEF Bangladesh said climate change “has pushed families deeper into poverty.”

“Climate change worsens storms and floods and undermines livelihoods. It also makes it harder to get safe water, food, or school. Unfortunately, one of the negative coping mechanisms we see is families arranging marriages for their young daughters,” she added.

Muhammad Humayun Kabir, the chief administrator of Sathkira district, agreed, saying, “they think marrying off their girls will save them from various social and economic problems.”

“Though we have no specific data, our observation is that the number of child marriages is increasing as the vulnerability of climate change victims are increasing,” he told BenarNews.

“We are working to prevent child marriages by building awareness and implementing the law in this regard.”

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Salinity intrusion has led to a host of health problems – and many women are having their uterus removed.

Jesmin Papri - Satkhira, Bangladesh

After suffering from abdominal pain and irregular periods for a long time, Feroza Begum had her uterus removed when she was 26 years old.

She had been diagnosed with leukorrhea, a medical condition where women experience thick whitish vaginal discharge. According to health experts, the ailment is caused primarily by fungal or bacterial infections and poor hygiene, and is exacerbated by a deficient diet.

“Initially, I was suffering from problems like leukorrhea. But I never considered it as an illness because it is very common in our community,” said Feroza, a 30-year-old resident of Boishkhali village in Satkhira, a coastal district in southwestern Bangladesh.

Many women in coastal areas such as Satkhira that are impacted by climate change are resorting to having their uteruses surgically removed because of severe infections and illnesses, including skin-related diseases, local residents, health workers, and experts say. They say these medical problems are occuring as a result of excessive exposure to saline water - a by-product of climate change in this part of Bangladesh.

BenarNews interviewed more than 75 women in remote villages of Shyamnagar, a subdistrict of Satkhira. Of them, 30 women said they had their uteruses removed following severe infections, while the rest complained of problems related to reproductive health.

Romesa Begum, a 40-year-old relative of Feroza who lives in the same area, had her uterus removed after suffering in almost the same manner. Both women blamed their issue on using salty water for bathing and other daily needs.

Global warming has caused sea-level rise and more intense storms, resulting in a decline of fresh water and the intrusion of salt water into village waterways in coastal Bangladesh, according to experts.

Health experts say women exposed to water with excessive saline content - whether during bathing, washing clothes, or fishing - are prone to inflammation and ulcers, leading to vaginal infections and even cancer of the uterus.

More than 80 percent of women and girls in Bangladesh use rags to manage menstruation, researchers say. The rags often become unhygienic, especially when washed in salty water, according to a study published in 2019.

“This repeated saline water washing of menstrual rags and their frequent use puts them under the threat of different kinds of hygiene issues. These sometimes lead to skin diseases and other sexual problems,” said the study conducted by three Bangladeshi organizations.

“Almost every woman suffers from leukorrhea and uterus-related diseases in this locality because they are taking their baths in salty water,” said Reshma Akter, a medical officer at Burigoalini Union Health and Family Welfare Center.

“The excessive use of saline water is damaging tissues in vaginal areas of women, which later infect the uterus and become the reason for other diseases.”

Dr. Hussain Shafayet, the public health chief in Satkhira, agreed.

“[U]terus-related waterborne diseases were due to the intrusion of salinity” in water that villagers were using daily, he said. Even teen girls were suffering from leukorrhea, “which is uncommon,” he said.

Complications after uterus removal

According to surgery registration books at three private clinics in Shyamnagar, at least ten percent of all surgery patients in 2019 underwent operations to have their uterus removed.

Dr. Tasnuva Afrin, who now lives in Sweden, worked at the Friendship Hospital in Shyamnagar for several years. She said most uterus patients were from the villages near a local river. This indicates that excessive salinity intrusion is one of the significant reasons for uterus-related illnesses, she said.

It can also “become a cause for infertility,” she said.

Dr. Ishrat Jahan, a gynecologist of Mymensingh Medical College Hospital, said that many women are suffering from other related complications, impacting their family and social lives because of uterus removal at an early age.

“A unique hormonal system controls the mental health, brain memory, and menstrual cycle of women. Removal of the uterus badly affects a woman’s total health system because it is destroying the hormonal source,” she said.

Several doctors told BenarNews that the health of women in the coastal area was notably worse than in other parts of Bangladesh, and they linked salinity to a host of health problems.

Dr. Rita Rani Paul, an assistant surgeon at the Shyamnagar Upazila Health Complex, said that more than 50 percent of women who took part in a screening for cervical cancer in 2020 showed pre-cervical cancer symptoms.

Dr. Nazrul Islam, medical officer of the Iswaripur Union Health Welfare Center, said that teen girls and mothers were suffering from other ailments, including but not limited to anemia, malnutrition, dermatitis, diarrhea, and dysentery.

The source of most of those diseases is a lack of fresh water because available water is high in salt, and they are drinking much less water than they should, Islam said.

In a report in 2012, Bangladesh’s Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE) said that women are among the worst sufferers from lack of fresh water because they are likely to drink less water, which increases the likelihood of high blood pressure and heart and kidney diseases among adult women.

Sharmind Neelormi, an academic and climate-change activist, said women in Satkhira district also have endometrial cancer, a form of uterus cancer that “destroys the menstrual cycle.”

“Excessive salinity in coastal water results from climate change, which leads to these physical difficulties,” Neelormi said.