JAKARTA, Indonesia — In Jakarta’s coastal fishing communities, child marriage rates are on the rise as families struggle with economic hardships. Siti and Azizah, two sisters married as teens, reflect a growing trend where parents view early marriage as a way to ease financial burdens amidst declining fish stocks and rising costs of living.
Marriage under 18, classified as gender-based violence by the United Nations, is still common in low-income areas where families lack economic options. Recent studies, such as one from Ohio State University, show that climate change exacerbates this issue. Extreme weather events have been linked to higher child marriage rates, as seen in countries like Bangladesh, where prolonged heat waves increased early marriage by 50% among young girls.
For Jakarta’s coastal families, climate-driven declines in fish stocks mean economic uncertainty, with early marriage viewed as a survival strategy. Addressing this complex issue requires solutions focused on sustainable livelihoods, education, and climate resilience.
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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
Just a few months after graduating elementary school,
I was suddenly told to get married.
I didn’t know why.
My mom simply told me, “Just get married already.”
I had mixed feelings. I wasn’t completely prepared.
But it didn’t matter.
OK, we’re here.
Let’s try our luck now.
Now, we dive.
I moved to Jakarta in 1998.
I started becoming a fisherman,
trawling for a living.
There were already mussel farms back then,
but not that many.
Slowly, over the years, more and more
people started farming mussels.
So I switched lanes from trawling to farming as well.
This is what we’re looking for.
Even though it’s not much…
We’ll go find more later.
That’s just how it is every day.
Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.
If we can’t find any, we keep on looking.
We collect little by little.
Let’s look for more.
There weren’t many factories yet,
but now there are many factories too.
Which means there is a lot of waste.
If you ask when was the hardest time…
It gets harder every year.
The changes in climate,
have had a big impact.
Because, well, maybe it does something to the water.
Like when the climate gets hotter,
the water also gets hotter.
So the fishes, it almost like…
They have disappeared from the coast.
They’re just gone.
My name is Raniti.
I have three kids.
The first one is named Siti, the second one
Azizah, and the third Farel.
I asked Siti to get married early,
because she was always sick,
so someone else could feed her
and provide her money daily.
So she wouldn’t be a burden to her parents.
Azizah is the same case, she was a young bride,
though not as young as her elder sister.
I myself was married when
I was around 12 to 13 years old.
To alleviate my parents’ burden.
I got married at 17, I wanted to do it.
I watched my friends who married young,
it seemed nice and fun, I wanted the same thing.
So I tried getting married early.
I married young also to alleviate my parents’ burden.
Turns out, getting married young
wasn’t the solution I thought it to be.
It gave me more problems instead.
My husband is a fisherman.
He doesn’t have a steady income.
Sometimes it’s 200,000 rupiah ($13),
sometimes it’s 300,000 rupiah ($19). That’s for a week.
Because at sea you have to deal with the waves,
with the tides.
There is also a lot of trash in the water.
That makes it hard for the fishermen to go out to sea.
They’d usually come back with nothing.
It is hard to catch anything.
We are victims of men!
That is why we shuck mussels.
We have to find our ways.
Not all men are like that.
But there is only one in a thousand.
The good ones are good, the bad ones are bad.
We can’t do anything for the bad ones.
– We must look for our food, do everything alone.
– What’s important is that we’re healthy.
We take care of our kids.
If it takes shucking mussels to feed
my children and myself, so be it.
I had hoped for my sons-in-law to have steady jobs.
It seems like the kids continue to burden their parents
even when they have agreed to marry young.
None of the kids have achieved anything
we can be proud of.
Not [Siti], not [Azizah].
As their parents we’re still struggling.
Still worrying about rents, water bills,
and keeping the lights on.
I’m two months behind on rent.
Money.
Yes, not now.
Pok ame ame, grasshoppers, and butterflies.
(Singing a lullaby)
Clap to make some noise,
(Singing a lullaby)
in the morning, drink some milk.
(Singing a lullaby)
My husband is a manual laborer.
My husband earns around 100,000 rupiah ($6.50) a day,
and I shuck mussels to help a little.
Shucking only pays, what? Twenty thousand ($1.30)?
It’s enough to buy my kids some snacks.
I actually want to continue my studies.
But there’s no one to look after the kids.
Just a few months after graduating elementary school,
I was suddenly told to get married.
I didn’t know why.
My mom simply told me, “Just get married already.”
Truth be told, I was nervous.
I didn’t want to get married, but suddenly I was told to.
They said it was because I kept falling ill.
I had mixed feelings. I wasn’t completely prepared.
But it didn’t matter.
My husband still doesn’t have a stable job,
it’s not comfortable.
How do we provide for the kids?
That’s it, really.
But they say that children bring fortune, right?
I was initially sad, I wanted to help my parents.
I want to help them live better lives.
So it doesn’t have to be this hard.
I really wanted to help by looking for jobs.
But you need a degree for these things nowadays.
I’m proud to see my daughters getting married,
building their own households and such.
As a parent, I just want them to have
better jobs in the future.
So that they can be stable, lacking nothing.
So they won’t end up like their parents.
That’s what I want for them,
what all parents want.
We just need to support
and be there for each other.
Take care of each other.
