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Amid monsoon rains preceding the heavy flooding in Pakistan, two young sisters, 14-year-old Shamila and 13-year-old Amina were given out in marriage to protect the family from the coming calamity. The action, made owing to a lack of funds only, brings the people of the poverty stratum in the region into a stark and miserable position.
‘I was glad when I was told I would be married,’ said Shamila, who was married to a man twice her age in the hope of a better life. But her expectations were soon to be disappointed. “But for now, I have very few things that I can call my own, and with the rains, things may go down even further.”
Child marriage rates in Pakistan have reduced in the recent past but human rights activists are seeing a revival in this pathetic modality in 2022 because of the harsh economic impacts occasioned by weather anomalies that force families into such bitter decisions. It is important to note that the monsoon season, which starts in July and to September is crucial to the survival and food production of millions of farmers. But climate change is causing these rains to be far less predictable and far more dangerous, resulting in landslides, floods and long-term crop damage.
Floods that hit Pakistan in the summer of 2022, leaving a third of the country under water and millions of people displaced, did not spare agriculture-rich Sindh province and it is still struggling to come to terms with such disasters: Many of the rural areas are still recovering and all of a sudden they are hit by another disaster that has hit them even harder than the floods. This has created what is referred to as the “rain brides,” where families sell off their daughters in marriage to have something to survive on, more so during the rainy season.
Mashuq Brahmani, head of an existing local non-governmental organization, Sujag Sansar, aiming at eradicating marriages of girls under eighteen years old, said that more cases of child marriage have been witnessed in the villages in Dadu district. In the Khan Muhammad Mulla only, where Shamila and Amina got married in June, 45 little girls have been given away in marriage since the last monsoon, 15 have done so this May end June this year alone.
‘Early marriage was unheard of in our area before the 2022 floods,’ said Mai Hijani, 65 years old, a village elder. Girls tended the soil and pulled threads of rope for the beds, and men fished and tilled the ground; manual labour was a constant activity.
Youths are forced to engage in early marriages in order to get some money to repay their parents’ debts. From Bibi Sachal, Shamila’s mother-in-law, the young bride’s parents received a dowry of 200,000 rupees (roughly 720 Dollars), which for families living on barely one dollar a day is a lot of money.
Najma Ali who was a young bride at the age of 14 in 2022, also gets marry and at the beginning, she used to find much interesting. But the actual picture was quite different from the imagined one. “My husband gave 250000 rupees to my parents for my dowry, which he has borrowed and cannot repay,” she said while nursing her six-month-old baby. ‘I believed I shall receive makeup, clothes, and utensils But now, we do not have anything to eat.‘
Most of the time the floods that hit in February 2022 have rendered some of the villages bare as their spacious rice fields were turned into deserts. The water from the canal has become polluted and there is no fish to be caught anymore hence families cannot fish to feed their families. Hence, the girls who used to be economic assets to families are now seen as liabilities, and most of them move back to their parental homes after marriage because their husbands are jobless.
The country ranks among the 10 countries where child marriages are most likely to take place, and official statistics show that about 23 percent of girls in the country are married off before they are 18 years of age. Even though, the legal age of marriage ranges between 16 and 18 years, depending on the different regions, women are seldom constrained by the legal provisions. Recently, Middle Eastern regions have expressed that storms, and floods, which are becoming more prevalent as a result of climatic changes, are likely to contribute to the increased prevalence of early child marriage, particularly among girls, a factor which threatens to roll back the gains achieved in the last year.
