Weather and Marriages

Source: Is this a Child Marriage_ _ UNICEF defines child marriage as… _ Flickr

It might seem difficult to believe that weather can have direct impacts on the cultural landscape of a country, but it is true and many examples can be brought forward to explain how exactly this happens. For many developing countries, bad weather can have more than environmental consequences for the population.

The most alarming of the effects is child marriage. Many people would be surprised to know that many young girls are forcibly married off in many regions because of reasons like poverty and climate change. Extreme weather is no joke and can ruin the lives of many children because of how devastating of an impact it can have.

Pakistan

According to a recent news article from Pakistan in 2024, two girls aged 13 and 14 were married off by their families in exchange for some sustenance. These were two of the many young children who became victims of child marriage because their families needed something to survive the floods which had terrorized the nation.

The rate of child marriages had lessened a lot during the last decades but the unprecedented risk posed by the floods after 2022 brought the curve to a peak again. The monsoons which used to be harbingers of life for the people of Pakistan but climate change has changed the whole scenario.

Many villages in the Sindh belt there haven’t recovered from the 2022 floods till date and one-thirds of the country has gone underwater. Millions of people got displaced and ‘monsoon brides’ were wed off to secure food and money. A lot of these marriages are forced and the young victims have no clue about their future life.

Yemen

In Yemen, nature isn’t the only factor leading to a rise in child marriages- a civil war also amplifies the ongoing crisis.

According to a statistical report, there were four million girls in Yemen as of 2019 and 1.4 million of them had been married off before the age of fifteen. This can be attributed to the Yemeni war which has completely changed the social dynamics of the country and plunged these young brides in a crisis. There were already some pre-existing norms which heavily favored early marriages but the humanitarian crisis amplified this demand and increased the rate of underage marriages in the country.

It is a dangerous coping mechanism and parents have to resort to such conditions because of their inability to raise their daughters on their own. Many times, it is done because it is believed that the husband’s family can care for them better. But many cases have been reported where the poor brides suffered because of sexual and physical violence at their new homes. Many brides died between the ages of 15 and 19 because of complicated pregnancies

Bangladesh

Floods also hit the poverty hit regions of Bangladesh and displaced countless families. This relationship between extreme weather and early marriage has been found in Bangladesh as well. Two main reasons were identified after a research study was conducted by taking 120 households into consideration. All 120 of these families were part of the two badly-hit areas of Sunamganj and Brahmanbaria.

The first reason was similar to the one we found in the previous two countries- the household expenses can be minimized and can be used to pay for fixing the damage. The second reason why this became prominent there is that unmarried daughters can become subjects of sexual violence and not get married later, as a result. Henceforth, they are wed early on.

In such conditions, it comes as no surprise that Bangladesh has been considered one of the “top 10 child marriage-climate hotspot countries”. The situation is expected to worsen and a warning issued states that nearly 40 million girls from these countries are at risk of getting married off at a young age because of climate crisis.

Sub-Saharan Regions

Sub- Saharan regions, Southern Africa in particular, suffers tremendously because of the El Nino which induces natural disasters like droughts. The unprecedented conditions, including high temperatures, delayed rainfalls and mid-season dry periods, reportedly hit 23 out of 28 districts in the nation of Malawi alone. Another assessment by the government showed that 44 percent of the national cropping area got ruined because of the ongoing health conditions. This led to severe food insecurity which affected 56.8 million people in the countries of Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Madagascar, Lesotho, Eswatini, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and Botswana.

Girls as young as twelve were forced into child marriages as well as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and this was done at “extremely alarming rates”. Families across Sub-Saharan Africa wed off the daughters in their households in the hope that they will live better in other places and there will be lesser mouths to feed. Money is also exchanged sometimes so that their lives and spending gets helped.

All of these examples just highlight the fact that climate change can have unseen and unpredictable consequences which are often overlooked. As the environmental crisis escalates, many vulnerable sections of society are forced to adopt by undertaking such heartbreaking activities which put their and their children’s lives in jeopardy. It’s important to address these issues because of these reasons and it should be common consensus that we need to break the cycle of child marriage as quickly as we can.

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