The Impact of Monsoon Rains on Child Marriages in Pakistan
To help the family withstand the fear of floods, 14-year-old Shamila and her 13-year-old sister Amina were married off in exchange for money as monsoon rains were due to pour over Pakistan.
“I thought my life would become easier… I was happy to hear I was getting married,” Shamila told AFP following her wedding to a guy twice her age in expectation of a more successful existence.
But I have nothing more. And with the rain, I worry I will have even less—if that is possible.”
Although Pakistan’s high incidence of marriages for underage girls has been inching down in recent years, rights campaigners fear such weddings are again on the increase due to climate-driven economic hardship after unparalleled floods in 2022.
Millions of farmers and food security depend on the summer monsoon between July and September; nevertheless, experts believe climate change is making them heavier and longer, increasing the likelihood of landslides, floods, and long-term agricultural damage.
Many Sindh communities in the agricultural belt have not rebuilt after the 2022 floods, which submerged a third of the nation underwater, displaced millions, and destroyed crops.
“This has resulted in a new trend of’monsoon brides’,” said Mashooque Birhmani, founder of the NGO Sujag Sansar, which opposes child marriage by working with religious academics.
Families will discover any kind of survival technique. Giving their daughters away in marriage in return for money is the first and most blatant approach.”
Birhmani stated that child marriage has surged in Dadu district, one of the worst-hit districts that for months resembled a lake, after the 2022 floods.
Since the previous monsoon, 45 young girls—15 of them in May and June this year—have become spouses in Khan Mohammad Mallah hamlet, where Shamila and Amina were married in a combined ceremony in June.
“There was no such need to get girls married so young in our area before the 2022 rains,” claimed 65-year-old village elder Mai Hajani.
“The men would be occupied with farming and fishing; they would labor on the ground and manufacture rope for wooden beds. Work to be done always existed.”.
Usually, in return for money, parents told AFP that they rushed their daughters’ marriages to spare them from poverty.
Bibi Sachal, Shamila’s mother-in-law, said they paid the young bride’s parents 200,000 Pakistan rupees ($720), a large amount in an area where households live on around one dollar a day.
“I planned to get lipstick.”
As is customary in Pakistan, Najma Ali was first enthralled by the thrill of becoming a wife when she married at 14 in 2022 and started living with her in-laws.
“My spouse paid our wedding 250,000 rupees to my parents. But he has no method of paying it back anymore; it was on loan—from a third party.”
Cradling her six-month-old infant, she told AFP, “I thought I would get lipstick, makeup, clothes, and crockery.”
“We have nothing to eat, so now I am back home with a husband and a baby.”
Their community, on the banks of a canal in the Main Nara Valley, is desolate, and fish have vanished from the contaminated water; their stink permeates the region.
Said Hakim Zaadi, 58, the village matron and Najma’s mother, “We had lush rice fields where girls used to work.”.
“They would raise numerous crops, all dead right now because the ground’s water is contaminated. This has occurred mainly after 2022,” she said.
“Before that, the girls did not burden us. Girls who used to get married now have five children and return to live with their parents because their husbands are unemployed.”
“I wish to study.”.
Government statistics released in December show that child marriages are somewhat widespread in certain areas of Pakistan, which boasts the sixth-highest number of females married before the age of eighteen worldwide.
Though the legal age for marriage ranges from 16 to 18, depending on the area, the law is not followed.
Although UNICEF has recorded “significant strides” in lowering child marriage, data indicates that severe weather events endanger females.
“We would expect to see an 18 percent increase in the prevalence of child marriage, equivalent to erasing five years of progress,” it wrote in a paper after the 2022 floods.
After the floods displaced Dildar Ali Sheikh, 31, he had intended to marry off his oldest daughter Mehtab while living in an assistance camp.
The daily-pay laborer told AFP, “When I was there, I thought to myself, ‘We should get our daughter married so at least she can eat and have basic facilities’.”
Mehtab hardly turned ten years old.
“The night I decided to get her married, I couldn’t sleep,” said her mother, Sumbal Ali Sheikh, then eighteen when she married.
Mehtab was enrolled in a sewing workshop so she could make a meager living while still in school; an NGO, Sujag Sansar, intervened, and the wedding was postponed.
She is, however, struck with anxiety that her promised wedding will also occur when the monsoon rains fall.
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