[In many parts of the world, the battle against child marriage is being won, with global rates dropping significantly over the last decade, largely because of progress in South Asia. But the story is complicated in Nepal, one of the region’s poorest countries, where activists say these marriages are increasing in some villages.]
By
Bhadra Sharma and Kai Schultz
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Rajesh Sada, 16, and his
wife, Punita, 15, in Gorgama, Nepal, last week. “I don’t think
anything
is wrong with child marriage,” Rajesh said recently. “It happens everywhere
here. It is an expectation.” Credit Lauren DeCicca for The New York
Times
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GORGAMA,
Nepal — In Nepal’s hot
southern plains, Rajesh Sada’s mother had one wish: that she would live to see
the marriage of her 16-year-old son before she succumbed to tuberculosis.
It only took only a few days to find a bride.
In March, several days before his mother died, Rajesh exchanged vows — with a
15-year-old girl he did not know. Five of his siblings — all married as
teenagers — smiled and congratulated him. They saw no reason to question the
moment.
“I don’t think anything is wrong with child
marriage,” Rajesh said recently outside his small hut made of mud, stone and
dried grass. “It happens everywhere here. It is an expectation.”
In many parts of the world, the battle
against child marriage is being won, with global rates dropping significantly
over the last decade, largely because of progress in South Asia. But the story
is complicated in Nepal, one of the region’s poorest countries, where activists
say these marriages are increasing in some villages.
According to new data released Friday by
Unicef, about 765 million people alive today were married as children. Nepal
has some of the world’s highest rates of such marriages, Unicef found, even
though the practice has technically been illegal in the country since 1963.
Nearly 40 percent of Nepalese women between
ages 20 and 24 were married by the time they turned 18, Unicef reported, and
the country also has an unusually large number of young grooms, a
little-studied demographic but one with unique social pressures.
Nepal’s government is moving forward with a
campaign to eradicate the practice in the coming years. The challenges, though,
are daunting, many activists say.
In rural areas, activists say some local
elected officials who publicly oppose the practice still have their children
married as teenagers. Literacy rates are low. Social media and mobile phones
have made it easier to find prospective partners. And many in Nepal see the
practice as reasonable considering the tough economic constraints in their
communities.
“It is so hard to change people’s thinking,”
said Ram Bahadur Chand, an official with Nepal’s child welfare board. “They do
not see that child marriage destroys their futures. It is a kind of violence.”
Nepal has tried to make inroads. The
government recently increased the minimum age for women to marry by two years,
to 20, matching the age for men. In January, officials announced cash
incentives and bicycles for families who kept their daughters in school.
Activists have organized along Nepal’s border with India to intercept young
brides at risk of being trafficked into prostitution. The country has vowed to
eradicate child marriage by 2030, and in some districts much sooner.
But the government’s efforts have met with
limited success. Apart from poverty and lack of education, activists said the
problem was partly linked to the nature of labor in Nepal, a rugged,
mountainous nation powered by remittances from citizens working abroad.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of men
leave Nepal for grueling construction jobs in the Persian Gulf. For poorer
families, marrying their daughters to boys before they head abroad is perceived
as both financially advantageous and a necessity. When villages empty of men,
“families need girls to take care of the elderly and handle household
activities,” said Tarak Dhital, a social activist in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.
Girls are plucked out of school once they
start to menstruate, a sign to some families that they are ready for marriage.
Their unions are often bound with the illegal exchange of a dowry. In some
Nepalese communities, women who wait until they are older to get married are
expected to give their husband’s family a larger share of land or money.
“That’s why poor people stop sending their
daughters to school and force them to find a groom,” said Santara Paswan, 26,
an activist from southern Nepal who said her parents coerced her into a
marriage at 15. “Our society is so backward.”
Pressure from parents is often enormous.
Rakesh Sada, 19, who is not related to the 16-year-old Rajesh Sada, was married
to his wife, Punti Sada, 18, three years ago at the insistence of Rakesh’s
mother. Over that time, Rakesh said, feelings of resentment over his early marriage
have increased.
They already have two young children. Punti
spends part of her days giving oil massages to Rakesh’s mother, who said she
was happy with the marriage. Rakesh makes a meager living driving a tractor in
the southern district of Saptari.
He vowed not to allow his daughters to marry
until they were at least 20. “I have no other option except to raise my family
in a better way, send my children to good schools and prepare for their
futures,” he said.
But the consequences of marrying at such a
young age were not yet apparent to Rajesh Sada, who has soft features and a
shaved head. In his village, Gorgama, where a few hundred laborers toil in
brick kilns, money is hard to come by, and most people drop out of school.
With his mother now deceased, Rajesh said his
wife, Punita, who moved into the family’s home, cares for his father and keeps
the house running. During the day, Rajesh makes about $5 working on a
construction site. He plans to leave for the Persian Gulf to earn enough money
to build a new house. An early marriage, he said, was unavoidable.
“My father is old, so I had to get married,”
he said. “I have no education. I couldn’t continue with school because I did
not have enough resources. I have no big dreams.”
As Rajesh spoke to a journalist, a gaggle of
villagers crowded around him, and Punita, who moved to Gorgama from a nearby
village, kept her face obscured by a bright sari. Asked for her thoughts, she
ran inside the couple’s house and did not come out.
Later, in a brief interview, she said that
her parents had found Rajesh and that she had no choice but to obey their
demand to marry him.
“I am an illiterate girl,” she said. “I have
nothing to say about child marriage.”
Bhadra Sharma reported from Gorgama, Nepal,
and Kai Schultz from New Delhi.
