KATHMANDU, NEPAL — When she was 13, Bishwokarma met a man who was 10 years older than her. It was autumn in Nepal during the joyful Tihar festival of lights. They shared a cigarette.
Days later, he said he wanted to spend a night with her. Bishwokarma, who asked to only use her last name, fearing stigma that still follows her, says she didn’t understand what that involved, but she agreed. Boys and sex were still a mystery to her. She had other concerns back then.
“I wanted to walk around in new jeans and a T-shirt, smelling good,” she says.
Not long after the night together, the man left for another district and cut off contact.
She was about three months along when she found out she was pregnant. She kept the news to herself, fearing humiliation from her mother and sisters and others in her village. But soon the whole village knew. The mocking began. It became even more unbearable after the baby was born.
News that an unmarried girl had given birth spread fast, she says.
About two weeks after giving birth to a baby girl, she told her neighbors the baby was missing. The neighbors began to search. They found the baby floating in a septic tank and called the police.
Bishwokarma was led away in handcuffs.
‘Completely alone’
In April 2024, the Dang District Court sentenced Bishwokarma to 16 years and six months in Bhaktapur Juvenile Reformatory, Nepal’s only correctional facility for girls, located in Sanothimi, just outside Kathmandu.
Bishwokarma, now 18, says she wishes someone had protected her, or that she’d known enough to protect herself.
“I was completely alone,” she says.
She is one of 20 girls under 18 who have arrived at the juvenile home in the last decade who were charged with infanticide or ending the life of a newborn — all were tried and sentenced as adults. Four have appealed their cases and were released, but the rest are still at the juvenile center. Some are serving sentences of up to 20 years while others face life in prison.
Child rights advocates say these girls should never have ended up here in the first place. The real question, says Ajay Shankar Jha, executive director of Public Defender Society of Nepal and vice president of the Nepal Bar Association, is “why do they do these things?”
Desperate decisions
All of the girls and women in the juvenile facility who were charged with infanticide, or ending the life of a newborn are, like Bishwokarma, from rural Nepal where poverty is rife and access to reproductive health education — although officially included in the school curriculum — is rare and inconsistent.
Sex and pregnancy among girls are taboo, but common. About 14% of girls ages 15 to 19 have been pregnant, according to the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey for 2022. Teenage pregnancies are more common among poorer households, according to the survey.
These pregnancies, especially in rural Nepal, come with punishing stigma, which can at times push girls like Bishwokarma to make desperate decisions.
“They do this to avoid society,” says Rabindra Bhattarai, a Kathmandu-based lawyer who helped the four girls who were released on appeal. They were all released after serving five to six years at the juvenile home.
Shame drove Bishwokarma to the edge. She says she couldn’t face living at home once everyone found out she was pregnant. She tried hiding at a friend’s house, but the friend’s parents discovered the truth and kicked her out. From then on, she wandered in the forest where no one would see her. She’d come out at night to look for food, whatever scraps she could find, then sleep in a stranger’s yard.
During that time, she remembered radio ads from her childhood that warned people of the effects of smoking on pregnant women, that it could cause miscarriage. Desperate, she turned to cigarettes and marijuana, but the method failed.
When she was eight months pregnant, her mother found her and brought her back home but still scolded her for getting pregnant. Even after she gave birth to her baby, the humiliation never stopped. Her neighbors called the baby “a child without a father.” Everyone avoided her; even the local priest didn’t come to name her daughter.
Bishwokarma says she felt no connection to her baby when she threw her in the tank.
The law ‘is guilty’
Although stigma is a big part of what leads these girls to such actions, the law “is guilty” too, says Bhattarai, the lawyer.
While the law prohibits sex with a girl below the age of 18, it doesn’t recognize that unique situation when charging a girl with infanticide of a child that results from the sexual assault, Bhattarai says.
“The man who caused the pregnancy should be prosecuted. It is against the law to punish children by establishing the case as a crime,” he says.
Girls who have been raped can access abortion in the country. This has been legal since 2002, and they could get one with consent from a guardian. But the law is also confusing. A 2017 Penal Code limits it to 18 weeks in cases of rape while a 2018 act puts it at 28 weeks.
Access is a problem too. Only about 19% of health centers in rural Nepal provide the services, according to a 2021 Health Facility Survey.
In some rural villages like the one Bishwokarma comes from, the window to access legal abortion can close quickly. Many girls and even married women aren’t aware abortion is an option. Even when they are aware, many don’t get them.
They fear being judged for the pregnancy itself but also for simply being seen walking into a clinic, says Kirtipal Subedi, a gynecologist and obstetrician.
“By the time they do, they are already several months pregnant. By then, it is too late,” he adds.
Data collected from April 2019 to December 2020 shows that about 73% of 1,835 women seeking abortions at 22 sites across Nepal were already more than 10 weeks pregnant by the time they sought care.
By the time Bishwokarma sought an abortion, she was already six months pregnant. She’d finally contacted the man responsible. He denied paternity, then suggested an abortion. She agreed. They traveled 85 kilometers (53 miles) to a clinic outside the district where no one would recognize them. But when they arrived, doctors turned them away, saying it was too late.
Lighter sentences
Even throughout the justice process, child advocates say the protections that the law offers to children are not applied. For example, Nepal introduced a juvenile system over a year ago to handle cases involving minors, but it is still inactive. Nepal is also a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls for detention as a last resort and for the shortest time possible.
For example, although the 2018 Children’s Act entitles Bishwokarma legal representation and a timely and fair judicial process, she spent 21 days waiting for trial, which the act prohibits. She was also interrogated without a lawyer, a family member or anyone who could explain what was happening.
“I could not find one person to look at me with kind, loving eyes,” she says. “[But] why would anyone speak for me?”
Bishwokarma confessed to throwing her baby in the septic tank before her trial began.
Bimal Regmi, the under-secretary of the Central Juvenile Justice Committee Secretariat, says minors are prosecuted according to their age and within the provisions of the law. If a court orders long-term placement of a child, he says, “we have no option but to keep them in the juvenile correctional home.”
Some advocacy groups are pushing for change. In March 2022, the Forum for Women, Law and Development petitioned the Supreme Court to fully decriminalize abortion in Nepal. This would mean allowing abortion beyond the current 28-week limit in some serious cases.
It would make it easier for women and girls to seek help, says Nabin Kumar Shrestha, a lawyer with the nongovernmental organization. Then they would see more options for addressing their predicament.
A bill to amend the Children’s Act is also under discussion in Parliament. It proposes, among other things, setting a maximum sentence of seven years for children.
‘Little incentive to change’
These days, Bishwokarma spends most of her days in a dimly lit room at the facility threading tiny beads onto string. The nights, she says, are the loneliest.
Like many juvenile detention facilities in the country, the center for girls is strained. Most of the juvenile facilities operate at two to four times their intended capacity, which fuels violence, escape attempts and other high-risk behaviors.
At the girls’ center, as many as a dozen girls share a single small room. The detention center has a capacity of 10, but houses about 40 girls, Shankar says. Part of the problem is that the girls continue to live there when they become adults, like Bishwokarma, who is 18. Some are as old as 26 while others are as young as 14.
The juvenile home lacks basic infrastructure, including a playground, educational facilities and health care, all of which the state should provide under the Children’s Act. There is a school on the premises, but only boys can attend from a separate juvenile detention facility in the same compound, since management prefers not to mix the two populations, says Pravin Silakar, a social worker at the girls’ facility.
This kind of environment isn’t conducive for children and leaves lasting effects, Shankar says. “There is little incentive to change.”
Regmi says funding is a major hurdle to providing a better environment.
For now, Bishwokarma is waiting for her sentence to run its course. She says no one from her family has come to visit her or called.
“I’ve been sitting like this for years, and I don’t know how many more years I can endure,” she says.
