Normal girls face new children’s marriage fears have followed the debate on changing laws News for gender equality

Bardiya, Nepal – Bali, unlike most girls around her, never loved to sing and dance. She loved cars and dreamed of her to feel she wrapped her fingers around the wheels and leave her village behind the mirror.

But her dream was interrupted on a sixth birthday when her parents sold it in the service.

He kicked her off five years, cleaned the floors and worked the fields for a family from her more caste from her. The waters system, overwhelming in southern Asia, is a century-old social hierarchy that continues to shape society: the people from Aastev on the lower bar of the ladder are often faced with overrising discrimination, despite modern laws against bias.

In return, Balin parents are allowed to rent a patla in Bardiya district, 540km (336 miles) west of the capital Kathmandu, where they could grow and sell their own product, splitting profits 50-50.

At 13, Bali was married to a man, electrician, six years older than her. She was pregnant with her only daughter for a year later.

Outside her one bedroom house in Bardy, Bali, now 32, told Al Jazeer that her greatest desire was to remain in her 17-year-old daughter.

“I can’t watch it trapped in the early marriage as I did,” she said.

Balin’s daughter is among millions of girls of adolescents in Nepal, which were the rights of women’s rights to be violated if a new law discussed the government’s reduction of 20 to 18.

In support of his goal to marry the child in 2030. year, the Nepalese government officially raised the Minimum age of 18. to 20. In 2017, the age of 18, and the idea of ​​the young women was to end school and may invest in a relatively informed election. For the first time, they found violations of the law could face up to three years in prison and fines up to 10,000 Nepalese rupees ($ 73).

In a country in which the legal implementation of the weak, a goal behind the increase in the minimum age for marriage was also a broader signal of conservative society – that women in concrete usefulness if they do not push them in early marriage.

However, 15. January 2025, in the movement caused a national debate, the parliamentary subcommittee within the representative House recommended to lower the legal age at 18 years.

The recommendation concluded that on the basis of “basic realities, we believe that the decrease in the marital age will be reduced to the legal complexity and reflect the social realities of Rural Nepal.”

Fans of laws that will reduce age, they stop to close to innocent men for getting married to a wedding. Others, including human rights groups, advocacy and teenagers interviewed by Al Jazeera, say the recommendation is designed for men’s protection, not to promote gender equality in Nepal.

Although illegally since 1963. year, a children’s marriage is done for generations in Nepal, especially in rural communities in which 78 percent of the population of the Himalayan nation lives. According to the United Nations Children’s Agency, UNICEF, in Nepal there are more than 5 million children’s bride, where there are 37 percent of women under 30 years before their 18th birthday.

Around the world are the causes of child marriage multiple. In southern Asia – the region with the largest number of children’s brinden – remains deeply embedded in traditional customs and social norms.

Although the prevalence of children’s marriage in Nepal fell in the past decade, the slider was much slower (7 percent) than in the South Asian region (15 percent) as a whole, according to the words Marriage data portal for childrenInitiative supported by the Government of Belgium, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Norwegian, Great Britain and the United States and the European Union. The non-profit and campaigns say their efforts are to eliminate the children’s marriage in Nepal, were driven by economic and social problems specific to the country.

The generation of suffering began in 1996. year, when the 10-year Nepalese civil war is a broken community across the country. The earthquake in 2015 was killed by almost 9,000 people – most of them in Nepal – and made hundreds of thousands of homeless people. Six months later, a Block from India Put 3 million Nepalese children under 5 in danger of death due to the shortage of fuel, food and medications. Pandemium on Covid-19 influenced almost a million jobs in Tourism in Nepal, which stems from the industry 6.7 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).

Lifeline for young girls

Children’s marriage in Nepal usually sees girls to hand over full control over their future family to your husband. He often interrupts education and employment and increases the likelihood of physical and psychological abuse.

Bali reminds one of the most difficult effects to marry so young every time he looks at his daughter.

When Bali gave birth, her “daughter was yellow and weighed only 4 kilograms (1.8kg),” Al Jazeera said. “I learned later that my body did not produce enough hemoglobin when I was pregnant. Like me, my daughter tire is very easy and need everyday medications.”

Mina Kumari Parajuli, Regional Plan International, Non-Government Rights in Nepal since 1978. said that children’s brides “for pregnant women, which can lead to complications such as malnutrition, anemia and higher deaths and infants.

Once in 2021. year, the professional training program offered by the plan International caught Baliova’s attention. If selected, it would give her driving classes. After taking the test, it would progress to training and control vehicles for heavy goods (HGVS).

“I was nervous, but excited because I knew I could,” Al Jazeera said.

It took 45 days for her HGV license to arrive. Bali was ecstatic. The company’s drawnings now works, which helps to finance their daughter’s drugs, she transports the boulder for construction every day.

“I’m the only woman who ever worked as a driver in the company and I’m so proud of it. I’m driving for a living so far!”

Suffering in silence

Other women, like 18-year-old Khim, who live near the Indian border in Bardy with a 36-year-old, still suffer in silence.

“Every morning she was always dressed and ready to go to school far before her brothers,” she recalled Khima’s mother with tears in her eyes. “She really enjoyed learning.”

Dressed in a jacket jacket, orange fleece, decorated with a paw with a paw, Khiman’s hands were gotten in front of her. Her gaze is still as he describes by watching her father, often drunk, beat the mother, who was forced to marry him when she was 14 years old.

In January this year, at the request of his mother, Khim, then 17, married a man who met only once before. He is 27 years old. “I thought he would have a better chance in life if she married,” her mother said. “So I told Khima to do that.”

Khima said he wanted to complete his education, but he doesn’t know if her “husband’s family would enable her.

Khima is marriage, as well as many others from the most unfavorable families, negotiated her relatives. This means that one smaller mouth feeds on the girl’s family, and often, an extra pair of hands for work and contribution to the household for her new laws.

Parajuli, whose NGO offers support and adapted to the care of the victims of the children’s marriage, said that it was challenging to “girl (who are married) while they are increasingly socially isolated from their peers.”

Like 22-year-old Anjali. She was 14 when she entered the “love marriage” – an expression used across South Asia to define marriages that did not arrange the vapor families. Anjali married her husband in secret, because he was from several caste.

Being a dalit – a community at the bottom of the hijerurh hierurphist complex – meant Anjali was effectively closed by her laws five years after marriage. Anjali was forced to work on his fields and forbidden to meet friends or return to school.

Thus, there was a strong caste against her that despite living based on her husband family, she and her daughter was not allowed to enter the family home. “They made me and their own granddaughter slept in the field in the field for five years,” she said.

During the monsoon season, she recalled “how the water pushed through the shelter without a roof, often caused it shivering and shaking until morning.”

Since her husband worked abroad in India and rarely visits. Tied to slavery for his laws and without access to education or employment, Anjali was desperate.

Last year she took 50,000 rupees ($ 362) from a local woman’s collective for the construction of a small stone house with two rooms, “close enough to” his laws to think he considered it acceptable. There is no access to liquid water and a broken hole covered with faded newspapers is the only window.

“This house is my palace,” said Anjali Al Jazeera. “After I can’t see my wife for two years, and I support everything, I have peace here.”

New generation with hope

In some rural regions of Nepal, there are indicators that young girls and boys harder to change.

Together with the International Plan, the Basic Organization called UNESCO Banks trained local authorities, law enforcement officers, religious leaders, schools and youth groups to identify and prevent children’s marriages and adolescents.

Mahesh Nepali, led the project in Bardy, said Al Jazeeri that since 2015. The children’s marriage rates fell from as much as 58 percent, 22 percent in many districts in many districts.

On a potential change of law, Nepali said that the age of legal marriage will be reduced in two years “wrong”.

“That would impair all the work we do to raise awareness of how dangerous young marriage,” he said.

SWOSIKA, 17, is a member of the Championship, the campaign group launched by the International Plan in 41 countries to combat gender-based violence and abuse in marginalized and often solid communities.

Despite the threats faced that the group members will beat or abducted because of their advocacy, SWozika and its team remain defiance. During Pandemic Covid-19, she launched the social media campaign, called hundreds of young girls on an internet group in which each of them sought to sign the declaration against practice.

(Up, is “practice” practice of children’s marriage or gender-based violence and abuse in marginalized and often difficult communities?)

“The network grew and grew” during the lock, says, and now they meet every Saturday two hours to talk to whether “someone is) and what needs to be done to completely remove (children’s marriage) completely.”

“At first, even my parents told me to stop the campaign, because they were worried about my safety,” said Swozika Al Jazeeri.

But she wouldn’t listen.

“Real change is going on,” she said. “I believe that the next generation of girls and boys won’t have the same problems we faced. We just have to fight.”

The family names of the victims and their relatives were removed to protect their privacy.