Nepal girls face new marriage fears amid a discussion of law change Gender Equality News

Bardia, Nepal Bali, unlike most girls around her, did not like singing and dancing. She loved cars and dreamed of how she would feel her fingers around the wheel and left her village behind her in the rear vision mirror.

But her dream was cut on her sixth birthday when she was sold in slavery by her parents.

For five years, she cleaned dishes, cleans floors and worked for a family of a layer higher than her country. The class system, prevalent throughout South Asia, is a social sequence for centuries that continue to form society: people often continue to dirt in the lower degree of peace in the face of firm discrimination, despite modern laws against bias.

On the other hand, Pali parents were allowed to rent a plot of land in the Bardia area, 540 km (336 miles) west of Katmandu, where they could grow and sell their own products, and divide profits 50-50 with the owner of the property.

At the age of thirteen, Bali was married to a man, electrician, older than six years. She was pregnant with her daughter only after one year.

Outside her one -room house in Bardia, Bali, who is now 32, told Al -Jazeera that her 17 -year -old daughter is her 17 -year -old daughter.

She said, “I cannot see her while she is besieged in an early marriage as I did.”

Bali’s daughter is among the millions of teenage girls in Nepal who fear women’s rights activists may be at an increased risk of damage if a new law is approved by the government to reduce the legal age of marriage from 20 to 18 years.

In support of its goal to end the marriage of children by 2030, the Nepalese government has officially raised the minimum age of marriage from 18 to 20 in 2017. Although Nepalese citizens can vote at the age of 18, the idea behind raising the age of marriage to 20 is to ensure that young women are completed in school and can make relatively more deductive options. For the first time, those who have found the violation of the law may face up to three years in prison and fines of up to 10,000 Nepalese rupees ($ 73).

In a country where legal enforcement is weak, the aim of increasing the life of marriage was to send a broader signal to a conservative society to a conservative society – that women are in partial benefit if they are not pushed to early marriage.

However, on January 15, 2025, in a step that raises the national debate, the Parliamentary Sub -Committee recommended that the House of Representatives be reduced to 18.

The recommendation concluded that based on “the ground facts, we believe that reducing the life of marriage to 18 will reduce legal complications and reflect social facts in the rural areas of Nepal.”

Supporters of law argue to reduce age that he will prevent innocent men from imprisonment for marriage. Others, including human rights groups, say groups of advocacy for women and teenage girls that the island met, the recommendation is designed to protect men, rather than enhancing gender equality in Nepal.

Although it has been illegal since 1963, children have been married on a large scale in Nepal, especially in rural societies where 78 percent of the nation’s population has lived in Himalayas. According to the United Nations Children’s Agency, UNICEF, there are more than 5 million children’s brides in Nepal, where 37 percent of women are married under the age of thirty years before their eighteenth birthday.

Throughout the world, the causes of children’s marriage are multi -side. In South Asia – the region with the largest number of children’s brides – is still deeply included in traditional customs and social standards.

While the spread of children’s marriage in Nepal has decreased over the past decade, the chip has been much slower (7 percent) than the South Asian region (15 percent) as a whole, according to what he said. Child marriage data portalIt is an initiative supported by the governments of Belgium, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union. Non -profit organizations and activists say that their efforts to eliminate children’s marriage in Nepal have thwarted the country’s economic and social problems.

A generation of suffering began in 1996, when the Nepalese civil societies that lasted 10 years were broken throughout the country. An earthquake in 2015 was killed nearly 9,000 people – most of them in Nepal – and made hundreds of thousands of shelter. Six months later, a The blockade from India Put 3 million Nepalese children under the age of 5 years at the risk of death due to lack of fuel, food and medicine. The Covid-19 pandemic affected nearly one million jobs in tourism in Nepal, which derives 6.7 percent of the total local products (GDP) of this industry.

Life artery for young girls

Nepal’s marriage in Nepal usually believes that girls deliver full control over their future for their husband’s family. It often cuts education and employment, and increases the possibility of physical and psychological abuse.

Bali is reminded of one of the most painful effects of marriage to young people every time she looks at her daughter.

When she gave birth to Bali, her daughter was yellow and weighed her only 4 pounds (1.8 kg), “she told the island. “I later discovered that my body was not producing enough hemoglobin when I was pregnant. Like me, my daughter was very easily tired and needed a daily medicine.”

Mina Kumari Parajoli, regional director of Plan International, a non -governmental organization working on the rights of children in Nepal since 1978, said that children’s brides are “at greater risk” of pregnancy at an early age, which could lead to complications such as malnutrition, blood or blood rates higher than mothers and infants.

One afternoon in 2021, Blan International’s attention was caught by Balai International. If chosen, they will be granted driving lessons. After passing its test, it was advancing on driving training and operating heavy commodity vehicles (HGVS).

“I was tense but I am excited because I knew that I could do that,” she told Al -Jazeera Island.

It took 45 days until the HGV license arrived. Bali was euphoria. In the transportation company that is now working, which helps in financing her daughter’s drugs, she transmits a lot of rocks for construction every day.

“I am the only woman who has ever worked as a driver in the company, and I am very proud of her. I get driving for a living now!”

Suffering in silence

Other women, such as 18 -year -old Kheima, who lives near the Indian border in Bardia with her 36 -year -old mother, is silent.

“Every morning, she was always wearing clothes and ready to go to school before her brothers.” “I really enjoyed learning.”

She wears a bright orange, decorated orange jacket, decorated with claw prints, my hand is installed in front of her. Her outlook still describing her father’s view, often drunk, and her mother, who was forced to marry her when she was fourteen years old.

In January of this year, she married Khima, who is 17 years old, at the request of her mother, from a man who once met before. 27 years old. “I thought she would get a better chance in life if she got married,” her mother said. “So I told Khima to do it.”

Khaima said that she wanted to end her education, but she does not know whether her husband’s family will allow this. “

Khima’s marriage, just like many deprived families, was negotiated by her relatives. This means that a lower mouth is to feed the girl’s family, and it is often an additional pair of hands to work and contribute to the family in her new foals.

“It is difficult to reach” girls (married early) because they are increasingly socially isolated from their peers. “

Like Angeli, 22 years old. She was fourteen years old when she entered “love marriage” – a term used throughout South Asia to identify marriages that the couple’s families did not arrange. Angeli married her husband secretly because he was of a higher layer.

Being Dalit-Society at the bottom of the hierarchical sequence of the complex Hindu class-means that Angali was imprisoned by her son-in-law for five years after her marriage. Anjali was forced to work in their fields and is prohibited from meeting friends or returning to school.

The strong was to the ranks against her that despite living on the land of her husband’s family, she and her daughter were not allowed to enter their family’s house. She said, “They made me sleep in a hut in the field for five years.”

During the seasonal wind season, I remembered, “How the water was raised through shelter without a roof, which often leads to its concussion and shaking until the morning.”

Since their marriage, her husband worked abroad in India and rarely visited. Played for her husband and without reaching education or employment, Angali was desperate.

Last year, she got a loan of 50,000 rupees ($ 362) from a local women’s group to build a small stone house with two rooms, “closing enough” to her foals to consider it acceptable. There is no access to the ongoing water and a broken opening covered with a faded newspaper that is its only window.

“This house is my palace,” Angeli told the island. “After not seeing my husband for two years, and I bear everything myself, I have peace here.”

A new generation with hope

In some rural areas in Nepal, there are indications that girls and young boys are striving for change.

Along with Plan International, a Popular Organization called the Banke Unesco (unrelated to UNESCO) United Nations) trains local authorities, law enforcement officials, religious leaders, schools, and youth groups to identify and prevent children’s marriages, as well as support for girls at risk.

Mahish Nepali, who is leading the project in Bardia, Al -Jazeera, told that since 2015, child marriage rates have decreased from 58 percent to 22 percent in many areas of the region.

Regarding the change of a potential law, Nepalese said that reducing legal marriage for two years will be a “mistake.”

“It would undermine all the work we were doing to raise awareness about the danger of young marriage,” he said.

Sustec, 17, a member of the champions of change, a group of a campaign started by Plan International in 41 countries to combat violence and gender abuse in marginalized societies that are often difficult to reach.

Although the threats are facing that the group members will be overcome or kidnapped due to their invitation, Swosity and her team remain enthusiastic. During the Covid-19s, a social media campaign began, and called on hundreds of young girls to a group online where they were asked to sign an advertisement against this practice.

(Above, is “practice” the practice of child marriage or sex -based violence and abuse in marginalized societies and is often difficult to reach?)

She says that “the network has grown and slept” during the lock, and now they meet every Saturday for two hours to discuss whether “anyone (may have been affected) and what to do to help eliminate it (children’s marriage) completely.”

“Initially, even my father told me to stop the campaigns, because they were worried about my safety,” Sustec said to the judges.

But she will not listen.

“The real change happens,” she said. “I think the next generation of girls and boys will not face the same problems we faced. We just need to continue fighting.”

The family names have been removed to the victims and their relatives to protect their privacy.