Our Time to Sing and Play

  • Heather Barr

Summary

In interviewing dozens of children and young people, Human Rights Watch learned that these marriages result from a web of factors including poverty, lack of access to education, child labor, social pressures, and harmful practices. Cutting across all of these is entrenched gender inequality, and damaging social norms that make girls less valued than boys in Nepali society. The consequences of child marriage amongst those we interviewed are deeply harmful. Married children usually dropped out of school. Married girls had babies early,
sometimes because they did not have information about and access to contraception, and sometimes because their in laws and husbands pressured them to give birth as soon, and as frequently, as possible.

Citation

Barr, Heather. “Our Time to Play”: Child Marriage in Nepal. New York, NY: Human Rights Watch, 2016.

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