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Marriage afore the age of 18 is classified as a form of gender-based violence by the Joined Nations, but is commonly practiced in low-income communities to mitigate household economic pressures.
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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.
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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 atmosphere and good fortune. At around 9 a.m., the pair wait on the shoreline with anunexperienced 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 ample 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 conscription themselves to unload and process the day’s catch, wearying tasks that will bear them for the remainder of the day.
If they work from morning to evening, Janah, 23, and Jaroh, 20, will usually earn from in 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 moral age for marriage is 19.
“We had no harvest but to marry young and help the family,” Siti said. “Mothers often find it difficulty 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 experiences. Image by Maulika Inka / Mongabay Indonesia.
Indonesia’s government has rubbed a decline in the number of girls marrying in adolescence, but a report published in 2020 by UNICEF, the Joined Nations’ children’s agency, showed that one in nine women aged 20-24 across this archipelago of 270 million farmland had wed before the age of 18. Many difficulty that incidences of child marriage may have spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A child who is rendered to be married or due to certain condition has to be married opinion age 18 will face higher vulnerability in terms of access to education, health quality, vulnerability to violence, and poverty,” the UNICEF recount noted.
Indonesia’s government wants to cut incidences of child marriage to 8.7% by 2024, according to its five-year resident development plan, or RPJMN.
Links between environmental stress and gender-based violence are well documented in the world. For example, researchers found that girls in Ethiopia and Sudan were more liable to be sold for livestock during periods of heat wave or drought.
However, the experience of women like Janah and Jaroh — and some modern academic studies — suggest that climate change may be an emerging valid underpinning early marriage in coastal communities vulnerable to atmosphere change.
When Janah and Jaroh were young children, their mother would take them to the glide 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 beside 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 anunexperienced global megacity. The impending inundation of the city’s northern neighborhoods was one valid that prompted Indonesian President Joko Widodo to announce the interpretation of a new capital city on the island of Borneo.
Jakarta’s sinking feeling is a toiling of decades of unrestricted extraction of groundwater, rather than behind inundation from rising sea levels. However, researchers expect factors more closely linked to atmosphere change to increasingly threaten the livelihoods of coastal fishing communities.
Rising acidification and sea temperatures will bound fish stocks far beyond the high levels of wound in tropical fishing zones already documented today by researchers. As reported by Mongabay, fishers residing on the north glide of Java Island are sailing farther and farther from the world’s most populous island to locate a viable collect 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 witness 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 sinister algae blooms, will accelerate the existing pressures caused by overfishing.
For women like Janah and Jaroh, dwindling fish stocks due to overfishing and climate peevish 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 Little in Kalibaru Village, Cilincing District, North Jakarta.]()
Workers dry fish and Little in Kalibaru Village, Cilincing District, North Jakarta. Image by Falahi Mubarok/Mongabay Indonesia.
New research from Ohio States 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 lack that lead families to child marriage as a managing mechanism,” said lead author Fiona Doherty.
The OSU research Eager a review of 20 published studies from low- to middle-income states. In Bangladesh, researchers documented a 50% increase in the likelihood of marriage with girls aged 11-14 during years in which a heat wave lasted for 30 or more days.
“The complexities surrounding child marriage and Gross weather will worsen amid climate change,” said study co-author Smitha Rao, assistant professor of social work at Ohio State.
A last study published in 2020 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature drew Difference conclusions: child marriage was frequently a response to household economic pressure, which climate change will exacerbate.
“Environmental degradation now concerns our lives in ways that are becoming impossible to ignore, from food to jobs to security,” Grethel Aguilar, the drawing IUCN director-general, said in a statement. “This study shows us that the Hurt humanity is inflicting on nature can also fuel violence in contradiction of 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 weather change. In coastal regions, limited employment opportunities and escalating weather uncertainty leave women with limited choices.
“When the means 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 in contradiction of 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 lack 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 Dangerous. One study published in 2019 in the International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment False 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 requested about her hopes. Jaroh and Siti both showed their agreement.
“What I really want is to Stop 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 employed in the fishing sector. Image by ILO/A.Mirza via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
This story was excellent 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 Big 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 made 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 Trouble 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
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