Sri Lankan Women Are Facing Domestic Violence Because of Climate Change

The teardrop nation of Sri Lanka punctuates the southern tip of India, surrounded by ocean. Not surprisingly, the country relies greatly on water for its economy and for its very existence. Listed as very at-risk on the Global Climate Risk Index produced by Germanwatch, a nonprofit development organization, Sri Lanka struggles with floods and droughts that severely impact not only agriculture, in which more than a quarter of Sri Lankans work, but also the salinity and quality of drinking water.

Because women are primarily responsible for domestic duties and make up about a third of farmers, according to the Sri Lankan government, it means that they also bear the brunt of providing in an increasingly difficult environment. And that means they often become the targets of their husbands’ or partners’ anger and frustration.

Rashmini de Silva, a gender and climate change researcher, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation this week that, in Sri Lanka, when basic needs are not being met, women can suffer physical, verbal and psychological abuse.

“There are records of domestic violence where men beat their wives, when even the smallest issues in regard to buying food or expenses for children’s education or farming have to be discussed,” she said.

Farmer Renuka Karunarathna, whose crops failed for years because of drought, said her husband uses her as a punching bag to release his frustration.

“I have got beaten up so many times,” Karunarathna told Thomson Reuters from her village of Sapumal Thenna in Sri Lanka’s North Central Province. “I suffer a lot.”

In a 2023 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that mental health challenges are associated with the effects of climate change, such as increasing temperatures, trauma from extreme events, and loss of livelihoods and culture. It’s not much of a leap to realize that women are going to face violence from men in such a pressure cooker.

“Increased GBV [gender-based violence] has been observed in both natural and human-caused crises and disasters, due to socioeconomic instability, structural power inequalities, health-care inaccessibility, resource scarcity, breakdowns in safety and law enforcement, and increases in (perceived) stress,” write the authors of a June 2022 study published in The Lancet.

As the world heats up and the environment fails to produce as it once did, women and girls everywhere are dealing with an uptick in violence. And this scourge is not only affecting women and girls in poor countries. For instance, domestic violence markedly increased during the massive 2020 Australian bushfires, and sexualized violence was a problem during Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. as people found themselves in desperate and cramped shelter conditions.

“There is mounting evidence from across the world — from sub-Saharan Africa to the Pacific to the U.S. — that the impacts of a changing climate are particularly dangerous for women and girls — and anyone without the privilege and ready resources and safety nets to cope,” Cate Owren, from the Global Program on Governance and Rights at the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation of Nature, told me when WMC started this project.

Specifically, she said: “Child marriage increases, transactional survival sex increases, and intimate partner and domestic violence increase when pressures mount over increasingly scarce resources.”

These crises, Owren added, “will have impacts for generations.”