‘(Un)tying the Knots Between Climate Change & Early Marriages’
Reetika Revathy Subramanian, founder of the ‘Climate Brides’ Initiative shares insights on the complex and challenging dynamics of climate change, women’s agencies and marriage in South Asia.
By Devyani Nighoskar
South Asia has the highest rate of early and forced marriages in the world. Nearly one in five girls are married before the age of 15. The region’s climate vulnerability has also long been apparent. Over 750 million people — half the region’s population, were affected by one or more climate-related disasters in the past decade.
It is no secret that climate change affects women disproportionately. Along with their reliance on natural resources for day-to-day chores — like cooking and cleaning; they are generally expected to put in extra hours during extreme weather conditions like droughts and floods as primary caregivers. Girls are also often the first ones to drop out of school, and may also be the victims of forced marriages — a coping mechanism by the family to deal with the economic shocks as a result of natural disasters.
To better understand the complex interlinks between climate change and early marriages, Samuel Hall’s Advocacy and Storytelling Officer, Devyani Nighoskar interviewed Reetika Revathy Subramanian (32), the founder of Climate Brides — an initiative documenting interconnections between early/forced marriages and the burgeoning climate crisis in South Asia.
A journalist and researcher from India, Reetika is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her doctoral research investigates the complex links between early marriage and cyclical drought in western India. As a part of the Climate Brides project, Reetika hosts the Climate Brides podcast.
1. DN: For our readers, how would you describe the connections between climate change and early/forced marriage — and its effect on the mobility of girls and women?
The cyclones of Bangladesh, blistering heat waves in India, the tsunami in Sri Lanka, and the floods in Pakistan, have demonstrated how the climate crisis intersects with and increases existing inequalities of gender, ethnicity, and capital flows. From increased labour for obtaining water, fuel, and food for their families, to facing new obstacles due to intense droughts and floods; rising cases of ethnic and gendered violence, including sexual abuse and rape, in the wake of a disaster, to additional challenges to accessing assistance and humanitarian aid during disasters — research indicates that marrying off a minor daughter during a climate-related disaster can mean there is one less mouth to feed. So, the links between early marriages and the climate crisis are complex, dynamic, but seemingly irrefutable.
2. DN: Could you take us through your aspirations and motivations to start Climate Brides? How did this initiative come about?
RS: This project essentially grew alongside my own doctoral studies, where I found that even as the links between gender, violence, and the climate crisis were a recent but growing field of inquiry, the lives and experiences of adolescent girls and young women remained underexplored both, in academic literature and in public dialogue. Yet, on the ground, fieldworkers, local journalists, and activists were seeing a perceptible impact of the crises on girls’ futures in schools, young women’s access to employment, rising food insecurities, and mounting pressures to get married in order to survive.
The rationale behind establishing Climate Brides was, thus, to tease out some of the underlying intersectionalities and nuances by engaging with specific geographies, communities and ecological vulnerabilities. It was also an attempt to listen to the voices of stakeholders working on the ground including activists, academics, collective and civil society members, and journalists, among others.
I initially set it up as a social media page where I began to translate academic literature that I was reading into more accessible social media posts. Each day we touched upon different themes that would add up to the broader conversations on such marriages of survival in different countries across the region. The posts covered topics such as honour, domestic violence, food insecurity, marital presentations (dowry and bride price), caste, labour, among other things. The campaign generated traction on social media, particularly on Instagram and Twitter. Gradually, I began to expand the scope of the project by inviting collaborators. The project also received the University of Cambridge Public Engagement Starter Fund 2021, which helped us build a website with key resources, readings, illustrations, and a podcast series.
3. DN: What are the current formats you operate in aside from the podcast? What are your approaches to research?
RS: At the moment, along with a team of two others — Maitri Dore, who is an illustrator, and Siddharth Nagarjan, who is a musician and sound producer — I run the Climate Brides Podcast. In the episodes, we listen to survivors, frontline workers, activists, and academics in and from the region, to unpack the everyday lives and resistances of young communities braving some of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. So far, we have released three episodes from India, Afghanistan and coastal Bangladesh, which are recorded in an interview format. Along with every episode, we also create illustrations and publish a set of relevant readings (suggested by the podcast guests), links and detailed transcripts on the website. In addition, we also run a focused social media campaign around the episode to highlight some of the specific vulnerabilities and experiences.
For instance, the episode with journalist Ruchi Kumar focused on her reports on the rise in early and forced marriages in the Internally Displaced Persons’ camps in Afghanistan, where coupled with the Taliban conflict, communities were grappling with increased drought. Professor Nitya Rao, meanwhile, shared her deep insights from the 30 years that she has spent on the field in Asia and Africa: of translating ‘climate change’ into local vocabularies, increased labour burdens on women and girls during a crisis, and changing marital practices in the wake of disaster and distress.
Thus, by bringing different stakeholders to share their insights from different vantage points, the idea of the project is to create a repository of knowledge that is accessible, relevant, and interesting to different audiences.
4. DN: There is a lack of strong evidence base when it comes to understanding the impact climate change has on girls and women. Why do you think that is — and what consequences does/could it have on policy and programming?
RS: Absolutely. Globally, there is a serious lack of robust scientific data to measure the impacts of climate change on girls’ lives. This gap in global research and evidence risks leaving girls’ and communities’ voices out of the programmes and policies that must protect them. For instance, in the historically drought-affected Marathwada region in western India, young girls are the first ones to drop out of school during a drought year to help support the increased labour burdens in the household. In coastal Bangladesh, meanwhile, in the aftermath of extreme cyclones, fishing communities living in the vulnerable hotspots are compelled to give their daughters away as ‘seasonal brides’. Similarly, in the months following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, young women were forced to marry to access state subsidies and compensation schemes. However, the majority of these findings are largely anecdotal in nature. They have been documented by not-for-profit organisations, collectives, and individual activists and academics. Such marriages, however, remain undocumented in state records making it very difficult to understand the gravity of the situation. The government authorities do not take responsibility to tackle the structural gaps. The COVID-19 pandemic has further compelled vulnerable families to get their daughters married in the ‘safety of their homes’.
5. DN: Our own research at Samuel Hall shows that early/forced marriages are often a coping mechanism or adaptation strategy to climate vulnerabilities. What do your research insights say about this? Is it a pattern observed across the region?
RS: Yes, while the motivations may differ based on the geography and circumstances, early/forced marriages are often the cause and consequence of poverty and extreme vulnerability. This means they are a means to both, adapt to as well cope with disaster. In the case of Marathwada, a region in India that I am closely studying as a part of my own doctoral research, early marriage has become a communally accepted way to deal with cyclical drought and loss of livelihoods. Through marriage, young girls are able to join the labour force as a partner in the highly extractive sugarcane harvesting industry.
On the other hand, in the Internally Displaced Persons’ camps in Afghanistan, early marriage is used as a means to even secure food provisions in the households. Female-led families, in particular, are compelled to sell their daughters in marriage in exchange of the bride price known as toyana. Of course, these exchanges are driven by a range of factors, including poverty, caste, land ownership, employment, among other factors, but the climate crisis is a crucial exacerbator.
6. DN: Our research also shows that besides traditional norms, other factors push girls into early marriages — such as economic pressures, debt repayment, and conflict resolution . How do you think these are further exacerbated by climate vulnerabilities?
RS: Knotted in a complex quandary of poverty, control of sexuality and consolidation of power, empirical evidence from disaster-prone regions suggests that early marriage needs to be addressed as a means of survival, either necessary or available to maintain or secure basic rights such as food and education. Here, patriarchy and other gender norms do play a role, but it is also the broader structural factors that exacerbate the frequency and intensity of these marriages. As indicated in the examples above, the climate crisis has a direct impact on the unpaid labour necessary to sustain the household. Globally, women and girls spend 200 million hours collecting water everyday. A climate crisis further increases their labour burdens and worsens many forms of gender-based violence.
Prior to the drought, the women and girls in the village of Kiriyankale in Sri Lanka’s northwestern province reportedly spent up to two hours per day collecting water for household consumption. However, the extended nature of the drought meant that they had to spend an excess of six hours, involving an arduous trek of over five miles from their homes to the nearest full waterhole. This amplified the dropout rate among younger girls and adolescents in these areas, making them more vulnerable to forced/early marriages. Similar experiences are being reported across the subcontinent.
7. DN: Based on your conversations and research, could you unpack a bit more about the (perceived) agency of girls in these marriages, and what they feel about the impact this has on their aspirations, etc? Who would you say is the most involved/has the most say in decisions around child marriage in the family?
RS: In academic literature on the relatively recent but growing field of gender and the climate crisis, it is fairly clear that women’s and girls’ agencies, which remains key to realising their adaptive capacities, remain understudied. Scholars such as Nitya Rao (who we interviewed in the first episode of our podcast) are helping fill those gaps. On the ground, meanwhile, these experiences remain varied. One key observation has been the impact of the Right to Education policy, which provides free and compulsory education to all students in India until Class 8.
Across Beed and even Udaipur district in India, the age at marriage is closely linked to the age at dropping out of school, which then, is around 14–16 years. Once their access to school is stopped and the linked mid-day meal scheme, girls remain vulnerable to marriage. This was also the case during the COVID-19 pandemic-enforced lockdowns, where digital schools remained inaccessible to many. Even as the age at marriage has increased intergenerationally–conversations with the girls’ mothers revealed that they were married at the age of 11–12 years–the numbers still remain high. This is why, several girl-led collectives (supported by civil society and grassroots’ organisations) are advocating with local government bodies to help support the girls to remain in schools for a longer period of time to defy early marriage.
In fact, a majority of the activism and public conversations on early/forced marriages have been led by women and girls, including in conflict-ridden settings of Afghanistan or the hyper-patriarchal pockets of Bangladesh or India. Decisions about marriage, however, are largely made by the men of the family or the community leader (again, male). In the absence of fathers or brothers in the family, decision-making power is often granted to a male cousin or relative.
8. DN: In your conversations with activists, researchers, and survivors — what has been the one point that has stood out?
RS: For me, one of the key findings in my work and conversations with different stakeholders–particularly families– has been the economic logic of such marriages of survival. The legal standing on early/forced marriages has focused on criminalising the parents and family members for fixing such marriages. However, on further investigation, one finds that families are very much a part of the broader structural problem that law is often unable to address. In nearly every case, the mothers of young brides, for instance, knew first-hand the implications of such marriages and had no intention to push their daughters into a potentially dangerous situation. However, with loss of livelihoods, increased food insecurity and potential threat, marriage becomes a means to survive. Here, even bridal payments that include monetary exchanges play a crucial role. As I mentioned earlier, early marriage under such trying circumstances is often the cause and consequence of poverty and inequality.
9. DN: The far-reaching consequences of climate change and forced marriages are quite complex and devising durable solutions — especially in the South Asian context — that is inherently patriarchal can be quite challenging. Based on your own research and interactions, what would you propose is the best way forward?
RS: If there is one key lesson that I have learnt over the course of the past decade — while working with indigenous communities in Rajasthan and Maharashtra as well as while interviewing bureaucrats and politicians — is that it is really important to build policy solutions from the ground-up. For, the consequences of climate change are socio-structurally mediated and unevenly distributed. The connections between early/forced marriages and the climate crisis, thus, are drawn based on particular social, economic and historical contexts of a particular region. It is important to develop a multi-pronged approach. While the law would render the parents of the young couple to be liable, it is important to understand that very often such marriages are fixed out of compulsion, for the very need to survive. A socio-legal approach, thus, becomes crucial. This means that it is important for the state to build relevant structures and mechanisms to ensure the provision of services and measures to all its citizens. This includes infrastructure for and access to higher education.
For examples, in Jalgaon district of western Maharashtra, authorities of a private-run school organised a free bus service from their school premises to the nearby villages. This actually led to a sharp decline in the dropout rate of girls enrolled in higher secondary. In addition, there is a need to maintain robust data on the registration of marriages, school dropout rates, and migration patterns at the village level. More broadly, there is a need to engage with larger issues related to livelihood security for families living in ecologically vulnerable hotspots.
10. DN: What are Climate Brides’ future plans?
RS: The plan is to expand the Climate Brides podcast by welcoming a bigger team on board. In the next season of the Climate Brides podcast, we are keen on recording more journalistic, non-fiction episodes that also feature field recordings, found footage, and secondary literature, among other elements. We are also keen on expanding the linguistic scope of the project by including more translations. In addition, given our experience of working with comics, we are also hoping to turn some of the podcast episodes into comic book stories that can then be distributed across schools and community library spaces. But for now, the focus is on continuing to document stories from the ground and bridging prevailing gaps between academic discourse and lived experiences of young women and girls living on the brink of everyday disaster.
