Aftab Alam Sthanadar

Civil unrest and the current profile of consanguineous marriage in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan

Information on the current prevalence and types of consanguineous marriages in Malakand District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (KPK), Pakistan, was collected from 1192 rural couples. Some 66.4% of marriages were between couples related as second cousins or closer (F≥0.0156), equivalent to a mean coefficient of inbreeding (α) of 0.0338. The data suggest that the prevalence of consanguineous unions in Malakand has been increasing during the last decade, in response to the high levels of violence across KPK.

Increasing prevalence of consanguineous marriage confirmed in khyber pakhtunkhwa province, pakistan

In their article on tribal Pashtuns in north-west Pakistan, Ahmad et al. (2015) drew attention to the slight decline during the last 20 years in the prevalence of consanguineous marriage in Bajaur Agency, which runs counter to our recent findings in neighbouring Malakand district (Sthanadar et al., 2014). We would like to clarify an apparent misreading of our paper by Ahmad et al. In their Discussion, they indicated that the 66.4% (α = 0.0338) consanguineous marriage rate estimated in Malakand was based on the parents of children with hearing impairment. This is not the case. As stated in our paper, the study was conducted by male and female interviewers at household level in rural areas of Malakand between January 2011 and February 2013, as part of a population-wide investigation to assess the prevalence of childhood hearing impairment. The families studied were representative of the rural population as a whole, and not restricted to families with a hearing-impaired child. The reported consanguineous marriage rate in Malakand should therefore be interpreted from a population-wide perspective. It does not represent the level of parental consanguinity in children with a hearing impairment. To determine whether the post-1995 decline in consanguinity reported for Bajaur was observed more widely in Pakistan, and more particularly in the north-west Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (KPK), we have extracted information on consanguineous marriage collected as part of the Pakistan Demographic and Health Surveys (PDHS), conducted in 1990/91, 2006/07 and 2012/13 (NIPS, 1992, 2008, 2013). The primary aim of the PDHS is to evaluate changes in the demographic and health status of the population of Pakistan, with detailed personal and family information collected at household level by trained interviewers. On a nationwide basis, consanguineous marriages declined slightly in

Response to Rehman et al. (2015)

In academic debates it is customary for authors to acknowledge errors of interpretation, unwitting or otherwise...