Essay by Eric Worrall
The husband wasn’t a sadistic POS wife beater, it was climate change which made him raise his fists?
Domestic violence is cost of climate change for Sri Lanka women
BY DIMUTHU ATTANAYAKE
THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION
Feb 15, 2024SAPUMAL THENNA, SRI LANKA –
After years of scant rainfall in a remote region of Sri Lanka, farmer Renuka Karunarathna’s crops failed and as the family’s income dwindled, her husband took his anger out on her, beating her so badly she had to go to a hospital.
“I have got beaten up so many times,” Karunarathna told said in her village of Sapumal Thenna in Sri Lanka’s North Central Province. “I suffer a lot.”
Domestic violence is a little-studied side effect of climate change, especially in poorer nations where increasingly frequent heat waves, droughts, floods and storms can exacerbate economic hardship, which in turn can fuel anger and violence.
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Although Sri Lanka has few detailed statistics on the links between climate change-related crop failures and gender-based violence, Rashmini de Silva, a gender and climate change researcher, said 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.
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I’m utterly disgusted by this attempt to excuse bullying and violence against women as a climate change issue.
Is claiming climate change made someone use violence against his family any different from claiming the devil made me do it? The devil is the person inflicting the violence.
The reason men beat their wives is they are useless excuses for men. They haven’t got the guts to take on someone who can hit back. Even worse, the abused woman’s brothers and father are too gutless to protect their sister or daughter.
To try to use climate change as an excuse for such vile cowardice, all I can say is Sri Lanka and anywhere else which tolerates such behaviour needs to take a good look in the mirror, and stop making excuses for violent thugs.
Cultural violence against women is fixable, either through legal changes or other means. Women in India, next door to Sri Lanka, finally got fed up with cultural tolerance of violence against women, and the refusal of authorities to act. Nowadays men in India who hurt women live in fear of being beaten by stick wielding female vigilante gangs.