By Maher Sattar and Ellen Barry Bangladesh’s Parliament recently softened its landmark law against underage marriage, a move that human rights activists say could roll back the country’s decades-long campaign to curtail teenage pregnancy and maternal and infant mortality. A new provision in the Child Marriage Restraint Act, which dates to 1929, allows girls under the age of 18 to marry in some circumstances. The change was met with praise from Islamist groups, which said it fell more in line with traditional religious practices. Bangladesh has one of the world’s highest rates of child marriage, but it has been gradually dropping under steady pressure from the government. In 2000, 65 percent of girls were married before age 18, and 38 percent were married before 15, according to UNICEF. Now those rates have dropped to 52 percent and 18 percent. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and other government officials have argued that…

Following the Women’s March in Washington and its sister marches around the world, Chinese women were noticeably absent from the international media spotlights. This is because street protests and demonstrations that “promote falsehoods” are illegal in China, and the Chinese government has a history of cracking down and retaliating against public events and figures that bring light to gender inequality. While the Chinese government’s restriction of public protests and demonstrations is nothing new, over the past few years, China has been slowly increasing its censorship of feminist media and publications. For example, in 2015, the imprisonment by the government of the Feminist Five, a group of vocal Chinese women’s rights activists, made headlines and led to an international outcry, leading to their subsequent release. The members of the group had been detained for distributing pamphlets about sexual harassment on March 8, International Women’s Day. This event from last year also…

A woman who has lived in the UK for nearly 30 years with her British husband has been deported to Singapore. Irene Clennell, 53, says she was forced to board a plane without warning on Sunday, after being held for nearly a month in an immigration detention center in Scotland. She had been living near Durham with her husband, two British sons, as well as a granddaughter, in the UK. For a year before she was detained, Mrs. Clennell was the sole caregiver for her husband John, a former gas engineer, after he had an arterial bypass and suffered complications from a hernia. “My husband is so stressed. He’s not well enough to travel,” Mrs. Clennell told BuzzFeed News earlier last month. “He’s in constant pain and there’s no one to look after him properly. “I just want to be with my family. I don’t have anything in Singapore.…

Dozens of topless women, joined by hundreds of fully clothed protesters, have demonstrated in Buenos Aires to demand the right to sunbathe semi-nude after police asked bare-breasted women to leave a nearby beach. Smaller protests have occurred throughout the country in recent weeks in response to the January incident and it remains unclear if Argentine law allows women to go topless on public beaches. Police cited a national criminal code article prohibiting “obscene displays” to justify asking the women to leave the beach, although at least one judge ruled after the incident that going topless was not a crime. Arguing that women should have the same right as men to sunbathe topless, the women chanted, painted slogans on their bodies and held signs reading: “The only breasts that bother them are the ones that aren’t for sale.” The demonstration in downtown Buenos Aires followed the “Not One Less” protests late…