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Floods, Women, and Survival: Pakistan's Hidden Crisis | EP 13 | Dear Body
19 Plays14 days ago
This week on Dear Body, I step into a story that is both urgent and deeply personal to me: the gendered impact of floods in Pakistan.
When we talk about climate disasters, we usually hear numbers: homes destroyed, acres submerged, lives lost. But behind every statistic is a body, often a woman’s body, carrying the heaviest burden.
That’s why I collected and wove together these stories. I felt the need to highlight them because these stories show that floods are not “gender-neutral.” They reshape women’s health, dignity, futures, and they demand a response that sees women not just as victims but as leaders of resilience.
These are not my stories, but I carry them forward because they deserve more ears, more eyes, more urgency.
Please support the organisations named here: Mahwari Justice, Mama Baby Fund, Sujag Sansar, HER Pakistan, whose work restores dignity where disaster strips it away.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Dear Body' and Episode Theme
00:00:00
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Hello everyone, my name is Saros and you are listening to Dear Body.
Impact of Floods on Women's Health and Dignity
00:00:04
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Today's episode is about one voice holding many others. In today's episode, I will be talking about the gendered impact of floods in Pakistan, how a rising tide becomes for millions of women a crisis of dignity, health and survival. I'll move through five things.
00:00:21
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Number one, the structural ways floods hit women harder. Number two, what happens to menstrual health and hygiene in disaster. Number three, the particular heartbreak and danger around pregnancy and motherhood.
00:00:35
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Number four, when floods steal childhood and the mental and emotional toll. And finally, number five, stories of resilience and what we can actually
First-Hand Accounts and Reporting Sources
00:00:45
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do. Everything I read and the voices I'm sharing today come from reporting and first-hand stories collected in the materials I've compiled. I'll name those authors and organizations.
00:00:59
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Picture this, a household where decisions are not yours to make, where the women are expected to wait until the men decide to leave or to prioritize the safety of children and elders first, often at the cost of their own escape.
Unique Challenges for Women During Floods
00:01:15
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Picture a home with no separate bathroom, no private corner, no lock on the door, and now imagine the house filling with water. Floods do not fall on people equally. They interact with social rules and pre-existing inequalities.
00:01:31
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Women are often the primary caregivers. They carry the babies, the bowls, the water. They wait at the door for transport. But in Pakistan, many women can't easily board crowded or mixed buses because of cultural restrictions or because relief distribution is male-dominated and does not account for women's specific needs.
00:01:54
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Markets that sell menstrual products and private clinics are cut off. Relief camps may not have female staff or separate safe spaces for women. These are not small oversights.
00:02:06
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They are life and health decisions.
Neglect of Women's Menstrual Health
00:02:09
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I want you to picture one story from the reporting. Sabzi, a mother from Maurypur in Karachi. On the morning, the rain swarmed her house.
00:02:18
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She was already carrying another older weight, the disappearance of two sons. She stood ankle-deep, then waist-deep water. But still, her heart was elsewhere, waiting, praying, and later cleaning mud from the rooms they had lost.
00:02:33
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Her story shows the double bind, personal violence and state violence. layered on top of environmental disaster. This is not an exception, it is a pattern. Periods don't pause for calamity.
00:02:47
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Yet when the floods come, menstrual needs are often overlooked. Women in camps report using leaves, cloth or nothing at all. Without clean water and private places to wash or dry reusable pads, cloth becomes a health hazard. The result is increased urinary and reproductive tract infections, severe discomfort and humiliation. There's also a longer, more insidious biological effect.
00:03:16
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Extreme heat, stress and pollutant exposure linked to climate shocks can actually disrupt menstrual cycles. Medical reporting shows cortisol, the stress hormone, spikes with heat and trauma and that can delay or provoke heavy or painful periods.
Pregnancy and Displacement Challenges
00:03:38
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Doctors in Karachi and other affected regions observed girls and women suffering new severe cramps and irregular cycles after heat waves and floods.
00:03:50
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These are not mere inconveniences. They can lead to anemia, infertility risk factors, missed school, lost work days, cascading harms.
00:04:01
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Practical detail can matter on the ground like grassroots groups including Mahawari Justice have devised three kinds of menstrual kits depending on context,
00:04:12
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disposable pads and underwear when clean water is available, cotton pads for some households and smaller emergency packs for when transport is impossible. They also include diagrams so women unfamiliar with commercial products can use them safely.
00:04:28
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That kind of context-sensitive thinking saves health. Imagine giving birth in a tent, on a boat, or in a school corridor with no sterile surface, no running water and no trained attendant. In 2022 floods, an estimated hundreds of thousands of pregnant women were displaced.
00:04:48
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Mama Baby Fund and volunteer midwives assembled safe delivery kits, plastic sheets, sterile blades, soap, mesoprostol, gloves and wraps and push them into camps.
Psychological Impacts on Women and Children
00:05:01
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Those kits are life-saving, but they are a bandage on a much larger wound, postpartum hemorrhage, infections, malnutrition, respiratory and gastric problems among infants.
00:05:14
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Peas increase when the health system is fractured and the trauma of displacement itself affects breastfeeding, maternal mental health and infant care. Midwives who worked in the camps speak of protracted emergencies.
00:05:29
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Roads destroyed, clinics inaccessible, care routines interrupted and a media attention span that moves on while the crisis remains.
00:05:40
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When we talk about floods, we usually think of broken homes, submerged crops and families left without food. But there is another wound, one that is less visible, yet far more permanent.
00:05:52
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The floodwaters don't just wash away land, they wash away girlhood. Al Jazeera published a devastating report earlier this year, written by their staff and based in Sindh, that introduces us to Asifa, a 13-year-old girl, when her parents told her, your marriage has been arranged.
00:06:12
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At first, Asifa thought of it like a celebration. Clothes, jewellery, gifts. She had no idea that marriage would mean being sent to live with a man much older than her, one she didn't choose, one who was in debt because he had to pay her family to take her.
00:06:32
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Two years later, Asifa is 15. She's already a mother cradling her baby under the same cracked, flower-battered sky where her childhood once was. And she says the words no child should ever have to say.
00:06:48
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I never truly understood what marriage would involve. Her family's decision wasn't tradition. It was desperation. The 2022 floods destroyed their fields of rice, okra.
00:07:01
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Everything they had saved for her education vanished overnight. With three or more children to feed, they believed they had no other choice but to marry her off. This isn't just one family.
00:07:14
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NGOs like Sujaq Sansar have recorded at least 45 child marriages in one village after the 2022 floods. That's why the phenomena has been given a new haunting name, Monsoon Brides.
00:07:29
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As Mashuk Birhani, founder of Sujaq Sansar explains in the same report, Before the floods, child marriages here were rare, but now parents arrange marriages just before monsoon season, believing it's a way to secure their daughters' future or protect them from the risks of displacement. And yet, what it really does is steal those futures. It cuts short education.
00:07:55
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It forces girls into motherhood when they are still children themselves. It condemns them to cycles of poverty.
Fighting Against Child Marriage and Advocating Change
00:08:03
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One mother, Salwa, told Al Jazeera about marrying off her own daughter at 12.
00:08:09
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Back in the 2010 floods, she still remembers her child clinging to her as she was taken away to her new husband's house. Today, Salwa is raising her daughter's children and she says with grief, I regret this decision deeply but I saw no other option at the time.
00:08:28
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Another survivor, Samina, forced into marriage at 13 during the floods, now joins Sujag Sansar's candlelight circles. Women gather, light candles and share their stories, reclaiming their voices against child marriage.
00:08:45
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Samina is now a mother of five, working to ensure her daughters never suffer the same fate.
Community-Led Relief Efforts and Resilience
00:08:52
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She says, I will make sure they are educated so they can escape the hell I endured.
00:08:58
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This growing reality has been described as Pakistan's monsoon riots. It's a chilling reminder that climate change is not gender neutral. Floods don't just destroy land, they destroy the future of girls.
00:09:12
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Floods break things you can see, roads. homes, crops. They also break routines and safety nets you can't measure. The emotional toll is enormous.
00:09:24
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Anxiety about what the water will take next, grief for lost livelihoods or loved ones, and the quiet, constant shame and humiliation of having no private space to be a woman. Sabzi's story returns here. While wading through flood water, she waits for court dates about her disappeared sons.
00:09:45
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She endures the rain and the mosquitoes, the cold nights and the persistent echo of absence. For many women, the disaster becomes the background to a more personal ongoing crisis.
00:09:58
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The mental health resources in camps are scant. Psychosocial support is underfunded. Women are expected to be resilient and that expectation is both a survival tool and a trap because it makes the need invisible. There's also intergenerational stress.
00:10:16
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Children become frightened by raids or by the chaos of displacement. Adolescents develop irregular cycles and severe anxiety. New mothers carry the deep fear that they cannot keep their babies safe. These are public health problems that become private tragedies unless addressed together.
00:10:36
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But we must not leave you in despair. Across the reporting are acts of quiet, fierce creativity. Women stitching reusable pads and selling them in markets.
00:10:46
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College it students forming Mahawari Justice and delivering tens of thousands of kids, midwives leading pop-up clinics and packaging birthing kits in living rooms, neighbourhood women organising cooking circles to feed displaced families.
Dignity in Emergency Healthcare
00:11:02
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Resilience here is not romantic, it's tactical. Designing a kit that works when there's no clean water, training local birth attendants to be part of disaster committees, making schools into safe space hubs with separate toilets for girls.
00:11:18
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These grassroots women-led responses show what dignity-centered relief looks like. They also show where funding and policy could multiply impact by supporting local leadership rather than parachuting in distant
How Can Listeners Support Women's Dignity?
00:11:34
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solutions.
00:11:34
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If you heard one thing today, dignity is a form of healthcare. Practical asks, things you can do or share are small but meaningful. Number one. Support organizations doing grief-sensitive relief. Groups like Mama Baby Fund and grassroots menstrual justice initiatives like Bawari Justice, Herb Pakistan and others that make kids, train midwives and push for long-term reforms. number two Amplify women's stories, share their reporting, tag elected representatives, demand menstrual products to be included in relief budgets. 3. Advocate for policy changes.
00:12:15
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Remove taxes that make menstrual products unaffordable. Require gender disaster planning that includes separate sanitation, female staff and maternal care integration. Number four, if you're producing or funding relief, insist on female distribution teams, private washing spaces and psychosocial support in camps.
00:12:39
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And lastly, for listeners inside Pakistan, Donate where you can. Volunteer with trusted local groups or connect with community widwives. As floods have returned, we must not accept that women's dignity will be collateral damage.
00:12:55
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The body remembers. The body carries grief and hope. If we centre bodily dignity in emergency response, we make relief that works for entire communities. Thank you for listening. The voices and reporting that shaped this episode come from the field reporting compiled by features including that of Hazaran Raheem Tad, health and menstrual research reporting by Elise Fatima and medical experts, Mama Baby be Fund reporting by Samya Kayoon, coverage of Mawari Justice and menstrual kits by Sanya Mansoor and others, and many interviews with medical practitioners and grassroots organizers.
00:13:36
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If this episode landed with you, do one thing. Forward it to one person who needs to hear it, a policymaker, a dooner or a friend. Dignity takes an audience.