In Saptari, a girl aged 15 and a boy of 17 fell in love and eloped after their families opposed their relationship. The girl’s family filed a case against the boy for rape and abduction. However, by the time the case reached Nepal’s Supreme Court in 2022, the couple had married and had a child. The court cleared the boy of rape and abduction but still sentenced him to six months for child marriage. Even then the couple stayed together and the criminal record stayed intact as well.

Such cases are common, says Noor Mohammed, a lawyer based in Kapilvastu. ‘‘Just on Wednesday, July 1, I had been in court for two such cases,’’ he said.

In both, teenage couples had eloped willingly, yet the girls’ families filed rape complaints against the boys. The families’ real objection was not the relationship itself but that the couples belonged to different castes.

‘‘It is an injustice,’’ Mohammad said. ‘‘If two teenagers are in a consensual relationship and intend to marry, charging the boy with rape is wrong.’’

Under Nepal’s National Criminal Code, any sexual relationship involving a person under 18 is treated as rape regardless of consent. The legal marriage age is 20 for both men and women. These two thresholds, blunt by design, have fuelled a debate about whom, exactly, the law is failing, and whom it is protecting.

These cases — a Supreme Court verdict from Saptari, two fresh complaints from Kapilvastu, and countless others that never make it to higher courts – prompted the Ministry of Law to act. In April, Law Minister Sobita Gautam formed an eight-member task force to recommend changes to the criminal code so that consensual relationships between teenagers close in age would no longer be treated rape automatically.

The proposed fix has a name borrowed from American legal history: a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ provision. It also borrows a key feature from Australian state law: a three-year age-gap rule. What it does not have, critics argue, is an honest accounting of the Nepali social realities — or a clear answer to whom, beyond the boys in correction centers whose cases spurred the reform, it is actually designed to protect.

When asked whether the proposed three-year threshold was derived from Nepali case data or borrowed from elsewhere, Laxmi Bakhadyo, a member of the taskforce and an associate professor at Kathmandu School of Law, provided an unambiguous answer: ‘‘It is largely borrowed. International doctrine is not uniform; it varies.’’ Thresholds do indeed vary widely: two years in several Australian states, five years in some Canadian provisions depending on younger party’s age, and case-by-case assessments elsewhere that weigh power dynamics and dependency alongside age.

Mohammed, who supports the reform’s intent, nonetheless shares the concern about the proposed three-year gap. ‘‘Three years is too wide a gap,’’ he said. ‘‘The difference in maturity and judgement between a 15-year-old and an 18-year-old can be significant.’’ He believes the right threshold is closer to one to one-and-a-half years — a range in which, in his view, two teenagers’ awareness and thinking are roughly equivalent. Beyond that, he said, the provision risks legitimising what he called ‘‘distortions’’: relationships that appear peer-level on paper but carry real power imbalances underneath.

Advocate Sashi Basnet, a Kathmandu-based lawyer with extensive experience handling child marriage and sexual violence cases, offered a sharper criticism. ‘‘Even a two-year difference creates a power imbalance between minors,’’ she said. ‘‘A 15-year-old and a 17-year-old are at very different stages of brain development and social maturity.’’ She said it’s better to set the gap at one year, and exclude children below a minimum age altogether.

The three-year threshold is there, but the reasoning that produced it, however, does not appear in the report. The report also did not emerge from broad consultation — the committee was given 15 days and consulted only institutions already represented on it: the Supreme Court, the Office of the Attorney General, Nepal Police, the Nepal Bar Association.

Child protection groups working directly with affected children were left out. ‘‘I don’t know the level of homework they’ve done,’’ said Mohna Ansari, former commissioner at the National Human Rights Commission. ‘‘And I haven't seen any consultation with human rights groups.’’

The same law has also become a tool for families to invoke the rape statute not to report sexual violence, but to punish relationships they disapprove of. In cross-caste relationships, inter-religious relationships, and in elopements that defy family wishes, the existing law has been used as an instrument of social control. Mohammed says he sees such cases regularly in Kapilvastu. The task force’s own member, senior advocate Meera Dhungana, acknowledged the problem directly: “There are cases where families file rape complaints after disapproving of relationships or inter-caste marriages. We realised the law was sometimes producing injustice instead of protection.”

A three-year age-gap rule does not take this tool away. Families can still file rape complaints over consensual, cross-caste relationships. The provision changes only the legal outcome, not a family’s ability to initiate prosecution. Ansari put it bluntly: ‘‘The law is already being misused even with the age set at 20. If an 18- or 19-year-old is in a relationship and the boy is Dalit, the girl’s parents may still file rape charges against him.”

Her concern goes deeper than misuse. The law’s framing, that it promotes equal treatment for teenage boys and girls, assumes a social equality that does not exist. She said, ‘‘We are talking about equality but society still holds different expectations for girls and boys.’’

India’s Supreme Court flagged a similar pattern in its 2026 ruling in State of Uttar Pradesh vs Anurudh, acknowledging that India’s child protection legislation (POCSO) was being repeatedly misused in inter-caste and inter-religious relationships to punish consensual adolescent relationships. Crucially, the court declined to legislate the fix itself, directing parliament to do the work. Nepal’s task force took the opposite route: it proposed importing a three-year age-gap rule directly into the existing code.

The reform’s stated beneficiaries are the boys being wrongly prosecuted. But data from Women’s Rehabilitation Centre (Worec) point to a population the task force did not appear to consult: the girls in those relationships, and what happens to them afterwards.

In the fiscal year 2022-23, the organisation documented 1,149 incidents of sexual violence. Of those, 8.9 percent were rape. Notably, 14.1 percent were marital rape (a category that tends to be invisible in policy discussions on adolescent relationships and marriage). The highest concentration of rape cases, 31.5 percent, fell in the 18 to 25 age group.

Sunita Mainali, Worec executive director, who works with the organisation’s safe houses, describes what she sees among teenage girls who arrive there: many are carrying unwanted pregnancies from relationship the law classifies as rape due to their age, even where the relationship was consensual.

“Once a boy finds out the girl is pregnant, he abandons her,” she said. “Neither the boy nor the girl’s family accepts her, especially if caste differences are involved, such as Dalit girl and a so-called upper caste boy. These girls, who are essentially children raising children, struggle with a lack of social security and a continuous cycle of violence.”

A three-year exemption changes how a prosecution proceeds. It does nothing for a teenage girl whose consensual relationship ends in pregnancy and abandonment. “Marriage and sexual relationships are completely different things,” Mainali said. “Lowering the age doesn’t help the 15-years-old facing unwanted pregnancies.”

Bhakhadyo said the provision would not create an automatic presumption of consent based on age alone; it would apply only to genuine “romantic relationships,” not to casual sexual encounters. But she acknowledged that the proposal contains no independent assessment mechanism for determining whether a relationship qualifies.

This is the gap Basnet has most clearly identified. “We need medical and psychological indicators to prove the relationship was genuinely consensual and not coerced,” she said. “Instead of immediate punishment, there should be a suspension of sentences for minors if experts confirm it was consensual. The state must also ensure confidentiality to protect the child from social ruin.”

Meena Paudel, a sociologist, outright rejects the reform’s framing. ‘‘The concept of a ‘Romeo and Juliet law’ is totally irrelevant in the context of Nepal,” she said. Her argument is not that teenage relationships should be criminalised indefinitely. It is that a legal exemption for consensual adolescent relationships only functions as a protection when the surrounding social infrastructure makes adolescent choice genuinely free.

Nepal, she said, has not built that infrastructure: comprehensive sex education is absent, economic independence for young women is limited, and the welfare systems that would allow a teenage girl who enters a relationship to make genuinely informed choices about her own future do not exist at scale.

Without those foundations, she argues, removing the legal deterrent does not expand girls’ freedom. It removes one of the few formal protections they have, while leaving the informal pressures — family, caste, poverty, the social meaning attached to girls’ sexuality — untouched.

Ansari arrives at the same conclusion from a different angle. The gap between Nepal and the countries the task force drew from is not just legal, it is structural. “There is a significant difference between Nepal and countries like Canada, US, or Britain, where education and employment systems are far more advanced,” she said. “Our social realities: caste considerations, school dropout rates, mindsets favoring very early marriage, results in different treatments.”

A law designed for teenagers with access to sex education, economic pathways, and institutional support does not transplant cleanly into a society where none of those conditions exist, she says

She extends the point to reproductive health, which she says is being ignored in the marriage debate. Nepal has pushed its maternal mortality rate markedly, in part through a dedicated helicopter service (President Women Uplifting Programme) associated with former president Bidya Devi Bhandari that airlifts pregnant women from remote areas when local birthing centres cannot handle obstetric complications. Lowering the marriage age from 20, she argues, risks undermining that progress. Earlier pregnancies, particularly in remote settings raise those risks the helicopter service was created to offset, and helicopters cannot reach every emergency in time.

She also extends the argument to geography. In Karnali, where girls aged 12 to 17 have among the country’s highest rates of early marriage driven by poverty rather than romantic choice, the gap between what this law addresses and what these girls actually face is widest. ‘‘If we only seek legal solutions, we won’t find a way out,’’ she said. ‘‘We are failing to correct the social part and only focusing on legal correction.’’

The stakes, she argued, extend beyond Nepal’s border. India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan have historically looked to Nepal’s laws as a reference point when considering their own reforms. A provision borrowed carelessly from Western frameworks and inserted without adequate evidence does not just affect the teenagers in Nepal’s correction centers. It shapes what the region considers possible.

Mainali emphasises the same point from her organisation’s data. The difference between a girl in Kathmandu and a girl in Madhesh or Karnali is the entire infrastructure of information, economic opportunity, and institutional support available to her when a relationship goes wrong. “The structural perception of women is a barrier everywhere,” she said. Decriminalising adolescent sex without addressing those conditions does not make girls safer. It leaves them more exposed.

The task force cited the number of teenagers in child correction centers as one of the main drivers for proposing the reform. But Bakhadyo confirmed that the provision would not apply retrospectively to those already serving final sentences. In other words, the very boys whose cases prompted the reform would not benefit from it.

Mohammed, however, pointed to a possible way around that. “The National Penal Code, 2017 provides that if a subsequent law prescribes a lighter punishment for an offence, that lighter punishment can be applied to existing cases.” That principle operates together with Criminal Offences (Sentencing and Executing) Act, 2017, which governs sentence determination and execution in Nepal. In other words, the law could be drafted to extend the benefit to those already in correction centers, but the task force’s report is silent on that possibility.

“The state has failed to implement existing laws,” Ansari said. “We keep changing laws every ten years without much research. We need stable laws and a society where people actually follow them.”