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DHAKA: The child marriage rate continues to rise since the COVID-19 pandemic, experts warn, as the latest UN data shows that more than half of Bangladeshi girls are married before reaching adulthood — the highest percentage in the whole of South Asia.

Bangladesh has long had one of the world’s highest rates of child marriage and, unlike other countries in the region, for the past few years has seen the situation worsening.

According to the annual report of the UN Population Fund released last month, 51 percent of Bangladeshi girls are found to have been married before turning 18, the legal age for marriage.

The rate was significantly lower at 29 percent in nearby Afghanistan, 23 percent in India, and 18 percent in Pakistan.

“Among South Asian countries, we are in a poor position when it comes to child marriage rates, even though we perform better on some other gender-related indicators set by the UN,” Rasheda K. Chowdhury, social activist and executive director of the Campaign for Popular Education, told Arab News.

“Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the child marriage rate in the country was around 33 percent. At that time, we were not the worst in South Asia in this regard. However, the pandemic disrupted everything.”

Data from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics shows a steady increase in child marriage rates of several percent a year since 2020, coinciding with pandemic lockdowns, which exacerbated poverty, disrupted education, and increased household stress.

“Our research found that COVID-19 increased poverty, interrupted education for both boys and girls, and worsened malnutrition. In this context, many guardians from underprivileged communities chose to marry off their daughters in hopes of reducing the financial burden on their families,” Chowdhury said.

“Poverty is the primary driver of early marriages, as many guardians are unable to cope with household expenses. As a result, they often choose to marry off their daughters at a young age.”

Lack of women’s access to education is usually seen as the main reason behind high child marriage rates, but Bangladesh has the highest enrollment of girls in secondary school in the whole region.

“Bangladesh has invested more in infrastructure development rather than human development,” Chowdhury said.

“To prevent early marriages, society must play a crucial role. The government alone cannot act as a watchdog in every household. Local communities need to take initiative and actively work to stop child marriages.”

Azizul Haque, project manager at World Vision Bangladesh, also saw the problem as related to social awareness.

“In the villages and remotest parts of the country, girls are mostly considered a burden for the family, so the parents prefer to marry off the girls as soon as possible … In many of the remotest areas, there are schools that provide education only up to class eight, so after the completion of their eighth grade in school, many of the girls have nothing to do at home. This situation also triggers the increase in child marriages,” he said.

“There is a huge lack of social awareness. At the national level, we need to strengthen the mass campaign conveying the demerits of early marriages, so that everyone becomes aware of the negative impacts.”

BERLIN: A German doctor went on trial Monday accused of killing 15 patients with lethal injections and acting as “master of life and death” over those in his care.

The 40-year-old palliative care specialist, named by German media as Johannes M., is alleged to have killed 12 women and three men between September 2021 and July 2024 while working in Berlin.

The doctor is accused of injecting the victims, aged between 25 and 94, with deadly cocktails of sedatives and in some cases setting fire to their homes in a bid to cover up his crimes.

The accused had “visited his patients under the pretext of providing medical care,” prosecutor Philipp Meyhoefer said at the opening of the trial at the state court in Berlin.

Johannes M. had organized “home visits, already with the intention of killing” and exploited his patients’ trust in him as a doctor, Meyhoefer said.

“He acted with disregard for life... and behaved as the master of life and death.”

A co-worker first raised the alarm over Johannes M. last July after becoming suspicious that so many of his patients had died in fires, according to Die Zeit newspaper.

He was arrested in August, with prosecutors initially linking him to four deaths.

But subsequent investigations uncovered a host of other suspicious cases, and in April prosecutors charged Johannes M. with 15 counts of murder.

A further 96 cases were still being investigated, a prosecution spokesman said, including the death of Johannes M.’s mother-in-law.

She had been suffering from cancer and mysteriously died the same weekend that Johannes M. and his wife went to visit her in Poland in early 2024, according to media reports.

The suspect reportedly trained as a radiologist and a general practitioner before going on to specialize in palliative care.

According to Die Zeit, he submitted a doctoral thesis in 2013 looking into the motives behind a series of killings in Frankfurt, which opened with the words “Why do people kill?”

In the charges brought against Johannes M., prosecutors said the doctor had “administered an anesthetic and a muscle relaxant to his patients... without their knowledge or consent.”

The relaxant “paralyzed the respiratory muscles, leading to respiratory arrest and death within minutes.”

In five cases, Johannes M. allegedly set fire to the victims’ apartments after administering the injections.

On one occasion, he is accused of murdering two patients on the same day.

On the morning of July 8, 2024, he allegedly killed a 75-year-old man at his home in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg.

“A few hours later” he is said to have struck again, killing a 76-year-old woman in the neighboring Neukoelln district.

Prosecutors say he started a fire in the woman’s apartment, but it went out.

“When he realized this, he allegedly informed a relative of the woman and claimed that he was standing in front of her flat and that nobody was answering the doorbell,” prosecutors said.

In another case, Johannes M. “falsely claimed to have already begun resuscitation efforts” on a 56-year-old victim, who was initially kept alive by rescuers but died three days later in hospital.

Prosecutors said he had “no motive beyond killing” and are seeking a life sentence.

The case recalls that of notorious German nurse Niels Hoegel, who was handed a life sentence in 2019 for murdering 85 patients.

Hoegel, believed to be modern Germany’s most prolific serial killer, murdered hospital patients with lethal injections between 2000 and 2005, before he was eventually caught in the act.

More recently, a 27-year-old nurse was given a life sentence in 2023 for murdering two patients by deliberately administering unprescribed drugs.

In March, another nurse went on trial in Aachen accused of injecting 26 patients with large doses of sedatives or painkillers, resulting in nine deaths.

Last week, German police revealed they are investigating another doctor suspected of killing several mainly elderly patients.

Investigators are “reviewing” deaths linked to the doctor from the town of Pinneberg in northern Germany, just outside Hamburg, police and prosecutors said.