Child marriage in nepal (Bal bibah)

Thirty-seven percent of girls in Nepal marry before age 18 and 10 percent are married by age 15, in spite of the fact that the minimum age of marriage under Nepali law is 20 years of age. Boys also often marry young in Nepal, though in lower numbers than girls. UNICEF data indicates that Nepal has the third highest rate of child marriage in Asia, after Bangladesh and India.

In interviewing dozens of children and young people, Human Rights Watch learned that these marriages result from a web of factors including poverty, lack of access to education, child labor, social pressures, and harmful practices. Cutting across all of these is entrenched gender inequality, and damaging social norms that make girls less valued than boys in Nepali society.

Many of the marriages we heard about were arranged—and, often, forced—by girls’ parents, or other family members. In some areas of the country, families marry girls at ages as young as one and half years old. We heard some children describe their unions as “love marriages.” In Nepal, the term love marriage is commonly used to refer to a marriage not arranged by the bride and groom’s families. Usually it refers to a situation where the two spouses have decided themselves to get married, sometimes over the opposition of one or both of their families. Although different from arranged marriages, love marriages among children are often triggered by the same social and economic factors.

The consequences of child marriage amongst those we interviewed are deeply harmful. Married children usually dropped out of school. Married girls had babies early, sometimes because they did not have information about and access to contraception, and sometimes because their in-laws and husbands pressured them to give birth as soon, and as frequently, as possible.

Solutions:

To the Government of Nepal 

Change Nepal's law restricting tyke marriage to make it more viable. Changes ought to: 

- incorporate harder disciplines for the individuals who mastermind or direct kid relational unions; 

- expel arrangements that segregate in light of sexual orientation; 

- build up a prerequisite that anybody leading or enlisting a marriage confirm the age of the life partners; 

- offer help administrations and pay to casualties of kid marriage; and 

- increment the statute of impediments for legitimate activity with respect to a youngster marriage until the wedded kid comes to at any rate the age of 21. 

- Guarantee that national law maintains universal rights and gauges in regards to kid marriage and that these laws are completely actualized by police, courts, and other government authorities. 

- Organize Nepal's accomplishment of the objective on completion youngster marriage by 2030 under objective 5 on sexual orientation value and engaging all ladies and young ladies in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. 

- As a follow up to the National Strategy to End Child Marriage, create and actualize the arranged National Plan of Action to End Child Marriage through a consultative procedure with every single significant piece of government and with common society, group pioneers, Dalit and indigenous people groups' rights bunches, religious pioneers, and youngsters. Guarantee that the arrangement includes counteractive action of both orchestrated and love marriage, and comprises of point by point arranges with clear lines of duty crosswise over various government foundations, satisfactory assets, and time-bound and quantifiable go-between benchmarks to track advance toward meeting the administration's objective of closure tyke marriage by 2030. 

- Bring issues to light of the law with respect to youngster marriage and the mischief brought on by kid marriage, enroll religious, political, and nearby pioneers as accomplices in counteracting kid marriage, and take particular activities at the group level to end kid marriage. 

- Actualize an arrangement of all inclusive necessary birth and marriage enrollment, guarantee enlistment records are open all through the nation, and consider authorities mindful on the off chance that they intentionally allow or enlist tyke relational unions. 

- Guarantee that youngsters, particularly young ladies, have admittance to great quality training and stay in instruction for whatever number years as would be prudent. 

- Find a way to make essential training mandatory by and by. 

- Enhance and grow the instructing of training modules for all school youngsters on sexual and regenerative wellbeing, and build up projects in all schools to avert tyke marriage and keep wedded kids in school. 

- Give important data about sexual and conceptive wellbeing and dangers of tyke marriage to out-of-school youngsters, particularly in underestimated groups.