Book Description

Child marriage is prevalent in South Asia, as it is estimated there are 285 million child brides. At present 59% of women aged 20–24 in Bangladesh were married under the age of 18, 40% in Nepal and 27 % in India. Child marriage is regarded as one of the harmful traditional practice existing in Nepal since time immemorial. Nepal aims to end child marriage by 2030 as part of its commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, the government of Nepal has already sanctioned a national strategy that provides an overarching framework to end child marriage. At the meantime, the criminal law of Nepal considers child marriage as a crime and punishes the person who perform or cause to perform child marriage. This research is a part of this consortium project which was commissioned by Women Rehabilitation Center along with International Women’s Rights Action Watch – Asia Pacific (IWRAW-AP) and other South Asian organizations for South Asian Initiative on FIRE from July 2019 to October 2020. Also, the data collection and the law review for the research report has been conducted from March 2020 to October 2020. This report aims to find out the changing trend of child marriage like either forced or self-initiated or other forms. Further, it also endeavors to understand the deep-rooted causes of the child marriage and its interconnectedness with the impacts it create to the girls and boys at different levels of their livelihood, family relations, reproductive health and legal consequences from adolescent perspectives. Finally, this report focuses on to revisit the laws on absolute criminalization of the child marriage and its effectiveness on controlling the agencies, decision making and choice of adolescents regarding marriage.