Shortly before the monsoon rains reach Pakistan, Shamila and her sister Amina, aged 14 and 13, were given in marriage by their parents in exchange for money to help the family prepare for the threat of flooding.
According to the criteria of
“I was happy to know that I was going to get married (…) I thought my life would become easier,” Shamila told AFP after her wedding to a man twice her age, with whom she hoped to enjoy a more prosperous life. “But I have nothing. And with the rain, I’m afraid I’ll have even less, if that’s possible,” he says.
The high number of marriages of underage girls in Pakistan had been declining in recent years. But after unprecedented floods in 2022, human rights activists say the practice is on the rise again. fueled by economic insecurity linked to extreme weather events.
The monsoon season between July and September is vital for the livelihoods of millions of farmers and the country’s food security. But scientists warn that Climate change causes these rains to last longer and intensify.increasing the risk of landslides, flooding and long-term damage to crops.
Before “there was no need”
“This has led to a new trend of ‘monsoon brides'”
Many villages in the agricultural belt of Sindh have yet to recover from the 2022 floods, in which One third of the country was left under water and millions of people were displaced. “This has led to a new trend of ‘monsoon brides’,” says Mashooque Birhmani, founder of the NGO Sujag Sansar, which works with religious scholars to combat child marriage.
“Families will look for any means of survival. The first and most obvious is to give their daughters in marriage in exchange for money,” he says.
Birhmani says that since the floods two years ago, marriages between girls have skyrocketed in villages in Dadu district, one of the hardest hit, which for months became a lake. In Khan Mohammad Mallah village, where Shamila and Amina were married in a joint ceremony in June, 45 minors have become wives since the last monsoon. A third got married in May and June of this year.
“Before the 2022 rains, there was no need to marry off such young girls in our area,” says Mai Hajani, one of the local elders aged 65.They worked in the fields, making ropes for wooden beds and the men were busy fishing and farming. There was always work to be done,” he says.
The girls’ parents told AFP that they had speeded up their daughters’ marriage to escape poverty.
Shamila’s mother-in-law, Bibi Sachal, says she paid 200,000 rupees ($720) to the young bride’s parents.a huge sum in an area where most families survive on one dollar a day.
“We have nothing to eat”
Najma Ali was initially very excited about her marriage in 2022, at just 14 years old, and her move to her husband’s family home, as is the tradition in Pakistan. “My husband gave my parents 250,000 rupees for our wedding. But It was a loan (from a third party) that now has no way to repay”he explains.
“I thought I would have lipstick, makeup, clothes and a set of dishes,” she told AFP, holding her six-month-old baby.But now I’m back home with my parents with a husband and a baby because we have nothing to eat.“.
The land is no longer fertile in her village, on the banks of a canal in the Main Nara valley, and there are no fish left in the polluted waters, whose smell permeates the area. “We had lush rice fields where the girls used to work,” says Hakim Zaadi, the village matron and mother of 58-year-old Najma.
“There were a lot of vegetables growing, which are now all dead because the groundwater is poisonous. This has been especially true since 2022,” he added.
“Girls weren’t a burden to us before. At the age when women used to get married, they now have five children and move back in with their parents because their husbands are unemployed,” she says.
“I want to study”
“We project an 18% increase in the prevalence of child marriage, equivalent to erasing five years of progress”
Pakistan is the sixth country in the world with the highest number of women married before the age of 18, According to government data released in December, the legal age for marriage varies from 16 to 18 depending on the region, but the law is rarely enforced.
Unicef has detected “significant progress” in reducing these practices, but There are indications that these extreme weather events put girls at risk“We project an 18% increase in the prevalence of child marriage, equivalent to erasing five years of progress,” the UN agency said in a report following the 2022 floods.
Dildar Ali Sheikh, 31, considered marrying off his eldest daughter Mehtab when he was living in a humanitarian camp set up after the floods. “When I was there, I thought to myself: ‘We should marry off our daughter so that she can at least eat and have basic services,'” the labourer told AFP.
The girl was ten years old at the time. “The night we decided to marry her, I couldn’t sleep,” says her mother, Sumbal Ali Sheikh, who got married at 18.
The intervention of the NGO Sujag Sansar allowed the wedding to be postponed and Mehtab started working in a sewing workshop, with which he can contribute a small sum home while continuing his education.
But when the monsoon rains approach, she is overcome with fear that her wedding will come with them. “I have told my father that I want to study,” she says. “I see married girls around me who have very difficult lives and I don’t want that for myself.”
SABINA QAZI
AFP
DADU (PAKISTAN)
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