Before Eighteen

I had three children. Two of them died. Only one is left. Kamala Kumari Pariyar said this to someone from Human Rights Watch, sitting in the shade outside her house in Nepal’s southern Terai. She was married when she was thirteen. That’s where it started—everything else came after.

Nepal’s government promised to end child marriage by 2020. Then 2030. Activists watch the same nothing happen. Thirty-seven percent of girls marry before eighteen. Ten percent before fifteen. The legal age is twenty. It’s not like they don’t know the law exists.

Nepal’s third in Asia for child marriages. Only two countries worse.

Human Rights Watch interviewed a hundred and four kids—talked to them about what marriage meant, what men meant, what it felt like to have children when you’re barely an adult yourself. Their answers are probably what Kamala could have told you at thirteen: that this wasn’t what they wanted, and it happened anyway.

I think about that—about Kamala in the shade with her one surviving child, and the thirteen-year-old version of her, before anything was decided. About how systems become so normal that pushing a deadline back ten years seems like an actual plan.