Child marriages are down to the weather, and Burundi is giving the UN a lesson in human rights

A wet bride is an unlucky bride. Plan International, one of the longest-standing and most influential children’s charities with consultative status and a partnership with the UN, announces that “climate disasters are increasing the risks of child marriage”. And the media are following suit. “‘She was only twelve’: climate change, a new driver of child marriage”, explains Le Parisien.

Political scientist Bruno Tertrais is outraged: “It is men and women who are forcing their daughters to marry, not the planet.” Physicist and philosopher of science Étienne Klein takes a sarcastic tone: “We will need to consider teaching the difference between coincidence, correlation and causality in all school curricula.” “Why is climate change fuelling child marriage?”, the BBC. “Climate disasters fuel early marriages”, The Independent. Internazionale: “The link between climate change and child brides”.

It is no longer even the fault of the ‘patriarchy’ (it was never the fault of the Islamic patriarchy): now it is the weather that is marrying off little girls. Take a horror and wrap it up in an easy, widely accepted cause, and simply say: ‘It’s the heat’s fault’. Not the custom that regards a daughter as a debt to be collected, nor the religious norm that links family honour to virginity. The heat. The drought. The flood. A cause which, unlike the others, requires no specific culture to be named and which allows, instead of an awkward discussion, an international forum to be convened where everyone can nod in agreement against a faceless culprit.

The anthropological and theological divide has thus dissolved into a mere atmospheric variable. The figures released by UNICEF for the Day of the Girl Child (11 October) reveal that there are more than twelve million child brides every year, with one girl becoming a sex slave every three seconds. “A child should never be in a marriage”, declare the United Nations. Yet the UN then uses a Western girl to represent child marriage – which is like using a well-fed Scandinavian child to illustrate hunger in Africa. Meanwhile, congratulations to Burundi on having just been elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council. In Burundi, one in five women is married as a child. Moreover, the regime in Iran – where, since 1979, the legal age for marriage has been lowered to nine – has been elected vice-chair of the UN Commission on Social Development, which aims to “promote gender equality”.

It is worth noting that the two countries with the highest rates of child marriage in the world also sit on the Human Rights Council in Geneva: Mali (71 per cent of brides are children) and Bangladesh (64 per cent). Hypocrisy is not a flaw in the UN system; it is the lubricant that allows the system to run smoothly.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that hundreds of marriages – some involving girls as young as eleven – have been registered not in the Hindu Kush, but in Baden-Württemberg, ranging from an eleven-year-old Iraqi girl to a fourteen-year-old Afghan girl, both married to men twice their age. But even in Germany, it will surely be the climate’s fault.