Girls and women face increased violence due to climate change

When there is a drought or food is scarce, women bear an additional burden besides being thirsty and hungry: Climate change puts women at increased risk of violence at the hands of men. While the connection has long been posited, a study published Wednesday from the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUC) confirms “extensive direct links” between environmental pressures and gender-based violence. 

Gender-based violence is used around the world by men to control women’s privileges and access to resources. According to the study, which looked at cases and data from more than 1,000 global sources, “conflict over access to scarce resources can give rise to practices such as ‘sex-for-fish,’ where fishermen refuse to sell fish to women if they do not engage in sex, which was seen to occur in parts of eastern and southern Africa. As limited natural resources grow even scarcer due to climate change, women and girls must also walk [farther] to collect food, water, or firewood, which heightens their risk of being subjected to gender-based violence.” 

Such violence has long been aimed at women miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where women do back-breaking work panning for gold under the often contemptuous eyes of rebel troops, Congolese Army officers, local chiefs, or civilian men. Sometimes these women are forced to have sex with the men controlling their site just to get permission to work (this is called “transactional sex,” even though it is more akin to rape). 

“We found gender-based violence to be pervasive, and there is enough clear evidence to suggest that climate change is increasing gender-based violence,” said Cate Owren, a lead author of the report, told The Guardian. “As environmental degradation and stress on ecosystems increases, that in turn creates scarcity and stress for people, and the evidence shows that, where environmental pressures increase, gender-based violence increases.”

Not only are women at risk while carrying out their work and everyday tasks for their families, but women human rights defenders and environmentalists are particularly in peril. Violence, according to IUC, is “aimed at suppressing their power, undermining their credibility and status within the community, and discouraging other women from coming forward.” Indigenous women are also main targets in countries like, Guatemala, Burma, India, and Honduras, where indigenous environmental activist Berta Caceres was gunned down in 2016. 

But women are not only suffering in developing countries. A study by the Australian government found that women in rural areas of the country going through drought or bush fires are more likely to experience domestic violence. In cases like these, men who lack healthy coping mechanisms turn to violence when they become frustrated at their lack of income and ability to provide for their family.

Another result of global warming is increased sexual slavery. “Peer-reviewed research continues to show that climate change underlies poverty and that poverty drives human trafficking,” Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of natural resources, ecology, and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, told The Guardian in 2013. After Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines that year, women and girls were trafficked with the promise of jobs or food.

There are some remedies to these increased risk factors of human trafficking connected to climate change, says the International Organization for Migration. But first: “In general, there needs to be an acknowledgement that human trafficking can be an unintended but direct consequence when migration occurs in the absence of government support and management, after disasters or in the face of slow-onset events.” 

As the Earth’s temperature continues to warm and seas continue to rise, acknowledgement that there is a problem, at minimum, would at least be a start.