Climate change pushes girls into prostitution
Four years ago, when her family’s home in central Bangladesh was washed away by floods, Pakhi and her family migrated to Dhaka to look for work. But with many families arriving in an already overcrowded city, with jobs hard to find, and with the family struggling to eat, the teenager eventually took one of the few jobs available. “I was around 14 years old when I joined the sex industry,” said Pakhi, now 18. “I did it only for the money. I had to buy food. I had to survive.” Today she is the main provider for her family, bringing in between $120 and $180 a month, she said, or occasionally as much as $240. But “there’s a limit to what my body can manage,” she said.
The work hasn’t brought the family a better life, however. Pakhi - who asked that her real name not be used - still lives with her parents and younger siblings in one cramped room, and most of her income goes to pay the rent and for her siblings’ education. She blames their plight on the changing weather that claimed their home. “The flood took everything away from us by destroying our house. We are in this situation because of the flood,” she said, before turning silent.
As it brings stronger floods, storms, droughts and heatwaves, climate change is making life harder for many of the world’s poorest - including driving some women and girls into prostitution. Every year, more than 20 million people, on average, are forced to leave their homes and migrate elsewhere, either temporarily or permanently, to escape the ravages of an ever- more-extreme climate, according to a 2018 report by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Often it is women and girls who suffer most from such displacement, said Alexandra Bilak, the director of the centre.
More pressure Linnea Engstrom, a Swedish member of the European Parliament, said displacement magnifies pressures women already face. “Women and girls are disproportionally affected by climate displacement because of already existing inequalities in society,” she said in an interview in Stockholm. “The poorest people tend to be very vulnerable and that’s usually women and girls,” she said.
Much of the displacement associated with global warming so far is happening in poor countries, and “a large proportion of the migrants that come from rural areas to Dhaka come because of climatic reasons,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development. “Poor countries are facing a greater problem than richer countries, both because they happen to be living in areas that are more vulnerable and also because they are poorer and have less ability to deal with the impacts of climate change,” he said.
In Bangladesh, considered one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change impacts, hundreds of thousands of people a year are forced to leave their rural communities and migrate to urban slums as a result of sea level rise, violent storms, erosion and floods, Bilak said. “Bangladesh is a country that has high exposure to natural hazards (and) densely populated areas that are already at risk of being affected by these hazards,” she said. As one of the poorest countries in Asia it “doesn’t have the capacity to cope”, Bilak said. — Reuters