WaPo op-ed claims climate change is causing increased violence against women

WASHINGTON (TND) — An op-ed published by The Washington Post this week tried to link climate change to domestic violence against women, arguing “more frequent and intense extreme weather events have led to escalating threats against women and girls.”

The article starts out by telling the story of a Kenyan woman named Pilot Lenaigwanai who was forced to flee her home due to her abusive husband.

The article admits the woman’s husband “was abusive even before the drought that’s now ravaging Kenya’s arid north,” but stated that after the family’s cattle – their source of income – died off, “the abuse became impossible to bear.”

“Lenaigwanai is one of the dozens of women who have arrived at the Umoja refuge in recent months fleeing violence that they say got worse as each successive year of low rainfall plunged their families deeper into poverty,” the op-ed continues. “For these and many other women around the world, the threat of violence could become more common as climate change makes extreme weather events more intense and frequent.”

The article cites a U.N. panel report, which asserts water insecurity leads to people adopting “maladaptive strategies” that increase the potential exposure to violence.

Using a hypothetical to prove its point, the report notes how an increase in the amount of water needed to be fetched by indigenous peoples can lead to greater risk of domestic violence, particularly against women, due to the increased possibility that one could fail to complete the days' water-related domestic duties.

The same U.N. panel report also said flooding can increase the risk of domestic violence for women.

“Heat waves, floods, climate-induced disasters increase sexual harassment, mental and physical abuse, femicide, reduce economic and educational opportunity and increase the risk of trafficking due to forced migration,” Terry McGovern, the head of Columbia University’s Department of Population and Family Health, told The Post.

However, McGovern did concede “that the data remains limited on some fronts,” according to The Post.

After posting the article to Twitter, critics piled on the backlash.

“TheBabylonBee couldn’t even make this up,” one user tweeted.

“Damnit,” journalist Tatjana Pasalic responded to the article, seemingly sarcastically, tagging satire site The Babylon Bee’s CEO Seth Dillon.

CBS’s “60 Minutes” was also recently slammed for a segment that included author and biologist Paul Ehrlich, who incorrectly predictedthat 4 billion people would die worldwide from starvation by 1989. His book "The Population Bomb" made similar assertions.

“60 Minutes extinction story has brought the usual right-wing out in force,” Ehrlich said on Twitter in response to the criticism his segment garnered. “If I'm always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I've gotten virtually every scientific honor. Sure I've made some mistakes, but no basic ones.”