What is the cycle of vulnerability in Maldivian family life?

The cycle of vulnerability describes how harm accumulates across the stages of family life in the Maldives – childhood, the transition to marriage, marriage itself, separation, and the years after divorce – and how children raised in unstable homes carry that harm into their own marriages a generation later.

Vulnerability begins before marriage

In Public Policy Lab’s research, most of the women interviewed entered marriage already carrying the effects of childhood violence, neglect, disrupted education, family instability, and limited guidance on relationships and their rights. Some married young specifically to leave difficult homes, with little knowledge of their partners or of what married life would entail.

Each stage feeds the next

Within marriage, harm took several forms at once: physical and sexual violence, psychological control by partners or in-laws, financial control through bank cards, salaries, identity documents, and debt registered in the woman’s name, and isolation from family, friends, and work. Separation did not end the harm but changed it – harassment, unpaid child support, custody used as leverage, and the immediate problem of somewhere safe to live. After divorce, economic recovery is slow: re-entering the workforce after career disruption is hard, and assets bought during the marriage were often never registered in the woman’s name.

Children carry the pattern forward

The women interviewed were, in many cases, children in homes like these themselves. Caseworkers described a girl absorbing being abused as what being a wife is, and a boy absorbing being abusive as what being a husband is. Because the stages are linked, an intervention at any one of them works in both directions – healing harm already carried, and preventing harm that would otherwise reach the next generation.

What interrupts the cycle

What most consistently protected children and women was a woman’s own income paired with control over how it reached her, education that opened both work and judgment, family and community willing to back her without conditions, and an institutional response when she asked for help.

Key facts

The cycle of vulnerability framework maps harm across five stages: before marriage, the transition to marriage, within marriage, separation, and after divorce – with effects on children running through all of them.
Most women interviewed in the research entered marriage already carrying harms from their own childhoods.
The research identified a woman’s own income and control over it, education, unconditional family and community support, and institutional response as the most consistent protective factors.

Sources

The Cycle of Vulnerability for Women and Children Within Family Life (2026) – Public Policy Lab research under the UNICEF Child and Family Well-Being Project

Last checked August 2026. If a figure here is out of date, tell us.