JANAKPUR, MARCH 3
The practice of child marriage is still prevalent in Dhanusha district though the laws bars marriage before 20 years of age.
As per the legal provision, the age of marriage for both boys and girls is 20 years in Nepal. Any wedlock before this age is considered illegal and it automatically becomes invalid. Moreover, it is also a punishable offence.
However, many people in the district are unaware of this legal provision. Hence, the graph of child marriage is rising. In view of the growing tendency of under-age marriage in the district, police in Dhanusha have initiated a special campaign to prevent and control the practice of child marriage.
Police prevented nine instances of child marriage in the past one-and-a-half months under this campaign, said Deputy Superintendent of Police Jeetendra Kumar Basnet of District Police Office, Dhanusha. DSP Basnet added that the campaign had been run to stop under-age marriage by spreading public awareness that child marriage is a punishable crime.
DSP Basnet said, "We have been launching interaction in villages under the Community-Police Partnership Programme on the harmful social practice of child marriage and have immediately stopped it as soon as we got information about it."
"We believe that cases of child marriage will decline this time due to this campaign," he said.
"Nine cases of child marriage have been stopped in the district till date since the month of mid-January," he added. "We reach the venue after getting information about child marriage. We stop it with the coordination of guardians, judicial committee and civil society," he said.
"Although some of the guardians take it easy while stopping the ongoing marriage function, most of them express worry and frustration," he further said.
Bijay Mandal of Bideha Municipality of Dhanusha said the girl's side had fixed the marriage after choosing a good and capable boy on the basis of his family background.
He said, "No one talks about the age of the boy and the girl while fixing the date for their marriage. Many people do not know about the legal provisions.
Even those who are aware of it do not care."
Guardians face problems when the marriage function organised by investing a huge amount is stopped at the last moment. In some cases, guardians are ignorant of the fact that child marriage is punishable by law. They are not aware that arranging child marriage could send them to jail.
In some cases, people get involved in child marriage even though they know about the legal provisions out of greed for dowry while some do not want to miss the proposal thinking that such a nice proposal may not come twice.
A version of this article appears in the print on March 4, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
