It’s pretty rare, these days, to find something out of France that absolutely gobsmacks you in terms of its cultural myopia.
This is doubly true in the establishment media. After all, the city hall in Limoges burned during the unrest there, and it got called a “mostly peaceful” protest.
However, as air-quotes “student” protests against school conditions and austerity measures — in other words, fiscal continence — ignores the people who are behind them, we have a French media outlet discovering the reason for child marriage in certain parts of the world: climate change.
Nothing to do with cultural factors. Nothing at all. Instead, Le Parisien ran an article last week titled “‘She was only 12 years old’: climate change, a new accelerator for child marriages.”
You won’t believe what a significant number of these child brides, married off tragically young, have in common. Or maybe you will. From a translation of the article, which was originally in French:
The chickens and ducks perished in the cyclone. With them, the meager family breadwinner. In Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Runa was 15 years old when her widowed and unworked mother married her to a stranger. “I didn’t want to get married. I wanted to continue my studies,” she told the Australian channel ABC in July. In a few gusts, the storm chased her out of childhood.
This gear is documented in the annual report of Plan International, an NGO for the defense of children’s rights, published a few days ago. Out of 5,000 young women interviewed in Bangladesh, Kenya, Peru, Senegal and Zimbabwe, 36% see more child marriages – before the age of 18 according to Unicef — after a climate shock. 11% say they themselves have suffered one. So far, however, these unions have been retreating.
Yes, that’s a large list of countries, but one in particular stood out:
In Bangladesh, climate change fuels an already massive practice. 51.4% of women aged 20 to 24 were married there before the age of 18, the highest rate in Asia according to Unicef. Especially since the vulnerability of the country is dizzying. In May 2024, Cyclone Remal exposed 8.4 million people, including 3.2 million children, to serious health and safety risks.
In addition to precariousness, there is also fear. Orthi, a 16-year-old Bangladeshi high school student joined by videoconference by Le Parisien, raises her community’s awareness of early marriages as part of an International Plan project. In this rural area close to the Sundarbans’ mangrove forest, disasters throw families out of their homes and expose girls to more harassment. Marriage then turned into an illusory refuge.
Orthi tells the lightning-fast one of a friend “who was only 12 years old”. In an anticyclonic shelter, after the 2020 cyclone Amphan, “boys were pulling on his scarf.” They also grabbed her hands, reports the teenager. Residents intervene. But, back in the village, rumors and infamous comments hit the girl and her parents.
Bangladesh is over 90 percent Muslim.
Not once was religion mentioned in the article, which came in the midst of riots that were driven, in no small part, by France’s Muslim minority.
I wonder if climate change caused the riots, too!
Do you believe that climate change is a valid reason for child marriages?
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Online, Le Parisien’s article drew derision from the Anglosphere — particularly in the United States, where noticing other causes of child marriage isn’t anathema:
Psychotic.
It’s not climate change that is accelerating child marriage.
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 13, 2026
The problem with child marriage, also known as pedophilia, is not climate change, but Islam… and everyone who defends this practice!
The article is hard to bear.
— J.G.🇺🇸🦅 (@Bleispit) October 14, 2026
https://t.co/zMrW8BGjnN
— Obadowski (@ObadowskiV) October 14, 2026
This would be risible if it weren’t part of the package the French left is going to take away from the riots: It was totally about austerity and school conditions. That’s why they were looting Louis Vuitton. Also, free Palestine!
That’s what burning down a historic building in Limoges was all about, Charlie Brown.
Any culture that refuses to define what ails it is definitionally committing suicide. The French clearly cannot and will not wake up to what mass migration has done to their culture.
Moreover, they cannot see what the same elements do to other cultures, particularly when it comes to heinous practices like marrying off 12-year-old girls.
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