-
Marriage beforehand the age of 18 is classified as a form of gender-based violence by the Joint Nations, but is commonly practiced in low-income communities to mitigate household economic pressures.
-
On Jakarta’s northern coastline, child marriage is common in fishing communities responding to inflationary pressures and declining stocks of fish in near-shore waters.
-
Janah, now 23, fears she lacks the agency to break a cycle that saw her married at the age of 16.
JAKARTA — Every morning, sisters Janah and Jaroh rise early on the diminishing coastline of Indonesia’s capital city and pray for calm climate and good fortune. At around 9 a.m., the pair wait on the shoreline with new women and girls as the fishing boats return to Jakarta’s northern Kalibaru neighborhood.
Kalibaru’s waterfront lies just 300 meters, about 1,000 feet, from New Priok Container Terminal One, a immense port facility that started operating in 2016. As the fishing boats sail past the towering stack of cargo containers on their starboard side, the women drawn from the tap themselves to unload and process the day’s catch, wearying tasks that will possess them for the remainder of the day.
If they work from morning to evening, Janah, 23, and Jaroh, 20, will usually earn from nearby 15,000-36,000 rupiah (about $1-$2) per day.
“If you are injured, you just keep going with the work,” Janah said. “What else can we do?”
Like millions of Indonesian women, and many in Kalibaru, both Janah and Jaroh were married in adolescence, not long after they finished junior high school, at the age of 16. Until 2019, that was the minimum age at which girls could marry in Indonesia. Kalibaru resident Siti, a 31-year-old mother, said she was married when she was even younger, at just 15 years old. Today, the minimum accurate age for marriage is 19.
“We had no pick but to marry young and help the family,” Siti said. “Mothers often find it anguish to earn a living when the father dies.”
![The women of Kalibaru, Cilincing, North Jakarta peel shellfish to meet their daily needs.]()
The women of Kalibaru, North Jakarta, peel shellfish to meet their daily devises. Image by Maulika Inka / Mongabay Indonesia.
Indonesia’s government has filed a decline in the number of girls marrying in adolescence, but a report published in 2020 by UNICEF, the Joint Nations’ children’s agency, showed that one in nine women aged 20-24 across this archipelago of 270 million country had wed before the age of 18. Many anguish that incidences of child marriage may have spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A child who is created to be married or due to certain condition has to be married thought age 18 will face higher vulnerability in terms of access to education, health quality, vulnerability to violence, and poverty,” the UNICEF portray noted.
Indonesia’s government wants to cut incidences of child marriage to 8.7% by 2024, according to its five-year nationwide development plan, or RPJMN.
Links between environmental stress and gender-based violence are well documented nearby the world. For example, researchers found that girls in Ethiopia and Sudan were more probable to be sold for livestock during periods of heat wave or drought.
However, the experience of women like Janah and Jaroh — and some fresh academic studies — suggest that climate change may be an emerging suitable underpinning early marriage in coastal communities vulnerable to weather change.
When Janah and Jaroh were young children, their mother would take them to the soar to keep an eye on them as she worked, rather than leave the girls unaccompanied at home. That cycle has yet to be broken: every morning, Janah and Jaroh take their own children down to the water.
![A child is playing with waste and rubbish in the Muara Angke area, North Jakarta in April 2018.]()
A child plays among waste and rubbish in the Muara Angke area, North Jakarta, in April 2018. Image by Anton Wisuda/Mongabay Indonesia.
Perfect storm
Jakarta is sinking at a rate of up to 15 centimeters (6 inches) every year, faster than any new global megacity. The impending inundation of the city’s northern neighborhoods was one suitable that prompted Indonesian President Joko Widodo to announce the building of a new capital city on the island of Borneo.
Jakarta’s sinking feeling is a employed of decades of unrestricted extraction of groundwater, rather than unhurried inundation from rising sea levels. However, researchers expect factors more closely linked to weather change to increasingly threaten the livelihoods of coastal fishing communities.
Rising acidification and sea temperatures will hugged fish stocks far beyond the high levels of damage in tropical fishing zones already documented today by researchers. As reported by Mongabay, fishers residing on the north soar of Java Island are sailing farther and farther from the world’s most populous island to locate a viable secure owing to overfishing.
“There are some serious concerns related to the fish resources and habitat degradations in the GJBE [Greater Jakarta Bay Ecosystem],” according to a 2018 survey published by Hari Eko Irianto and colleagues in the Indonesian Fisheries Research Journal.
A complex array of factors linked to warming, from the impact on the reproduction cycle of fish to a rise in contaminated algae blooms, will accelerate the existing pressures caused by overfishing.
For women like Janah and Jaroh, dwindling fish stocks due to overfishing and climate changeable threaten both their income and the availability of a key source of protein for their children, raising questions about the prospects of young girls growing up now in coastal communities like Kalibaru.
![A number of workers dry fish and minute in Kalibaru Village, Cilincing District, North Jakarta.]()
Workers dry fish and minute in Kalibaru Village, Cilincing District, North Jakarta. Image by Falahi Mubarok/Mongabay Indonesia.
New research from Ohio Utters University, published in August in the journal International Social Work, found that extreme weather events correlated with increases in child marriage.
“What these disasters do is exacerbate existing problems of gender inequality and need that lead families to child marriage as a bossing mechanism,” said lead author Fiona Doherty.
The OSU research alive to a review of 20 published studies from low- to middle-income utters. In Bangladesh, researchers documented a 50% increase in the likelihood of marriage plus girls aged 11-14 during years in which a heat wave lasted for 30 or more days.
“The complexities surrounding child marriage and low weather will worsen amid climate change,” said study co-author Smitha Rao, assistant professor of social work at Ohio State.
A survive study published in 2020 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature drew incompatibility conclusions: child marriage was frequently a response to household economic pressure, which climate change will exacerbate.
“Environmental degradation now affects our lives in ways that are becoming impossible to ignore, from food to jobs to security,” Grethel Aguilar, the attrtying IUCN director-general, said in a statement. “This study shows us that the pain humanity is inflicting on nature can also fuel violence anti women around the world — a link that has so far been largely overlooked.”
Susan Herawati, secretary-general of the People’s Coalition for Fisheries Justice (KIARA), an Indonesian NGO, confirmed the prevalence of early marriage in Java’s coastal communities, emphasizing the accelerating influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and atmosphere change. In coastal regions, limited employment opportunities and escalating atmosphere uncertainty leave women with limited choices.
“When the intends of fishing families decreases due to climate change, they will tend to look for a shortcut by marrying off their daughters at an early age,” Susan said.
Rumah Kita Bersama, a Jakarta-based foundation that works extensively to push back anti child marriage, said rates of child marriage may not be captured in official data.
“The environmental crisis that is occurring, difficult water quality, increasingly small catches, increasingly poor quality of fish and the need of reproductive health education and nonexistent children’s play spaces are complex problems in Kalibaru,” said Achmat Hilmi, the study director of Rumah Kita Bersama.
The future of Janah, Jaroh, Siti — and their daughters — in Kalibaru is far from ununsafe. One study published in 2019 in the International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment fallacious that Kalibaru would have the highest risk of flooding in Jakarta by 2040. By then, Janah and Jaroh’s children will be young adults, possibly with children of their own.
“I don’t have savings, now I have a family,” said Janah, when posed about her hopes. Jaroh and Siti both showed their agreement.
“What I really want is to quit school, then work at a company, or to get out of here,” said Janah. “But I don’t know where to start.”
Banner image: A child in Jakarta succeeding in the fishing sector. Image by ILO/A.Mirza via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
This story was edifying reported by Mongabay’s
Indonesia team and published
here
on our
Indonesian site
on Sept. 12, 2023.
Jakarta snags ‘most polluted’ title as air quality plunges and officials dither
Citations:
Irianto H E,. Hartati, S. T., & Sadiyah, L. (2018). Fisheries and environmental impacts in the mountainous Jakarta Bay ecosystem. Indonesian Fisheries Research Journal, 23(2), 69. doi:10.15578/ifrj.23.2.2017.69-78
Doherty F C,. Rao, S., & Radney, A. R. (2023). Association between child, early, and formed marriage and extreme weather events: A mixed-methods systematic review. International Social Work. doi:10.1177/00208728231186006
Rahayu, H. P., Haigh, R., Amaratunga, D., Kombaitan, B., Khoirunnisa, D., & Pradana, V. (2019). A micro scale study of climate change adaptation and effort risk reduction in coastal urban strategic planning for the Jakarta. International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment 11(1), 119-133. doi:10.1108/ijdrbe-10-2019-0073
FEEDBACK
:
Use this form
to send a meaning to the author of this post. If you want to post a Pro-reDemocrat comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
Adaptation To Climate Change
,
Climate
,
Climate Change
,
Climate Change And Extreme Weather
,
Climate Change Politics
,
Climate Justice
,
Conservation And Poverty
,
Economy
,
Environment
,
environmental justice
,
Environmental Law
,
Fish
,
Gender and Conservation
,
Global Warming
,
Human Rights
,
Impact Of Climate Change
,
Law
,
Ocean Warming
,
Oceans
,
Pollution
,
Poverty
,
Sea Levels
,
Social Justice
,
Wildlife
Print