Climate change did not cause child marriage

Imagine that British girls who might be learning to read or planning their Halloween costumes are instead being sold to grown men. For many girls in Afghanistan, this is childhood. Yet in the Guardian’s telling, the central culprit is climate change, not the men who rape and abuse children.

That’s the central premise of a piece published this week entitled “‘I am still a child, it cannot be good to be married’: how drought forces Afghan families to sell girls as brides”.

One mother, who didn’t know her own age but had girls aged two and five, told journalist Elise Blanchard that she had cried a lot when her daughters were engaged, or, more accurately, sold. She said:

I know they are too young to be engaged but we had no choice – otherwise we would have waited until after 18… I expect them to be beaten, but there is nothing I can do about it. And at 14, they will be pregnant.

The children will be sent to live with their husbands’ families, probably before the age of ten. The article explains that such children are “expected to know how to run a household. When they are unable to do so like adults would, domestic violence from in-laws is not unusual.” 

This is an odd detail, as the inescapable inference is that if only these child brides were better housekeepers, they’d escape a beating. As if violence in response to suboptimal housework was somehow natural.

While the Guardian is to be commended for reporting on this at all, the squeamishness about condemning the behaviour of Afghan paedophiles, and social norms that allow them to operate in the open, is astonishing. What we are offered is a glimpse into a hellish society where families have to choose between staying alive and caring for their children. 

But the men “buying” girls as brides, and their wider families, do have a choice. They could say “no”. They could have some humanity. And contrary to the Guardian’s bizarre angle, it is not global warming that is behind these grisly exchanges. It is a patriarchal culture where women, girls and, to some extent, boys too are regarded as chattels, burdens or potential farm animals, to be put to use as decided by the man of the house. The piece makes reference to a man who sold one of his ten-year-old son’s kidneys. But why it is socially acceptable to buy organs or girls is beyond the Guardian’s comfort zone of blaming the far right and carbon.

Drought does not cause child marriage. When millions died in Ukraine’s 1930s Holodomor, children weren’t suddenly sold off en masse to the randy old of the Nomenklatura. 

In Afghanistan, men arrange the marriages and receive the bride price. In one case mentioned by Blanchard in passing, a father exchanged his 14-year-old daughter so he could take a second wife after his first became ill. Crop failure may help explain why a family is desperate but it does not explain why a daughter is treated as a domestic slave to be sold and bred.

The devastation brought by Taliban rule has increased such practices. The regime has abolished earlier legal protections, with the 2009 law criminalising underage and forced marriage, and the sale or purchase of women under the pretext of marriage, no longer being enforced. Marriages arranged for minors can now be legally arranged by their fathers or grandfathers. The decree says a girl’s silence on reaching puberty can count as consent. Meanwhile, girls are barred from secondary school and women from university. Women’s access to work and independent travel is restricted. 

Oddly, Taliban rule is not explicitly referred to in the piece. Instead, Blanchard helpfully reflects on Afghan ignorance of climate change:

“The population relies on so little to live that notions of overconsumption or greenhouse gas emissions are completely alien,” she explains. 

Desperate families and children are not being abused by the weather, or by capitalism. They are being abused by men

Drought might have intensified hardship in an already desperate country, yes, but it does not decide who has to bear its cost. Tackling that would require something harder than recycling or going on a march against climate change. To start with, it would involve admitting that not all cultures are equal, and that the misery of Afghan families is not entirely down to Big Oil.

The Guardian has managed to make the climate — and presumably by extension the West — the villain of a story in which men sell girls, marry them off and expect them to endure abuse. But desperate families and children are not being abused by the weather, or by capitalism. They are being abused by men, under a regime that condones it.