3 Child Marriage (Bal Bihe)

Definition: marriage where either party is below twenty years (Nepal's statutory marriage age — both parties, no gender asymmetry, among the world's strictest).The consequences' architecture: the marriage voidable/void in the family-law scheme (the child's annulment right); the criminal liability of the arrangers (the offence's true targets: the families and the officiants); the dowry-and-poverty drivers (the Terai's early-marriage economy — the sociological note); the state's campaign architecture (the National Strategy and the child- marriage-eradication programming — the commitment to end child marriage by the SDG-era target); the enforcement gap (the prosecution's rarity against the custom's ubiquity — the criminalization-vs-practice gap the essay must confront).