Another Article on Nepal's Sex Tourism

From treks to sex

Jan 24th 2008 | KATHMANDU From The Economist print edition

Is a new sort of thrill-seeker heading for Nepal?

“I CAN only dance when I'm drunk,” confides Srijana, a 20-year-old employee of the Pussy Cat Bar and Shower, a tavern in Thamel, Kathmandu's main tourist hangout. A few slurps from a customer's glass later and she mounts a small stage. There, to whoops from a few tipsy locals, she sheds most of her clothes and gyrates to a Hindi pop tune. Dangling above her is the Damoclean sword included in the bar's name: a silver shower nozzle, positioned to spray flesh-revealing water on a dancer below.

Such gimmicks are common in Thamel's bars, where competition for lascivious males is fierce. Until a few years ago Nepal had no obvious sex industry. There are now an estimated 200 massage parlours and 35 “dance bars”, such as the Pussy Cat, in Thamel alone—with over 1,000 girls and women working in them. Many sell sex. In the Pussy Cat, another dancer admits to turning tricks, for 1,800 rupees ($28).

That is a tidy sum in Nepal, South Asia's poorest country. It is much more than Nepali women are paid in India's flesh-pots—to which over 5,000 are trafficked each year, according to the UN. But the dancers in Thamel are chasing a richer sort of Indian: tourists. And their government seems to be encouraging them. In an advertisement for “Wild Stag Weekends”, the Nepal Tourism Board offers this advice: “Don't forget to have a drink at one of the local dance bars, where beautiful Nepali belles will dance circles around your pals.”

In a country with a rich tradition of dance, where paying for sex is illegal, this might be harmless innuendo. But not everybody thinks so. During the recently-ended civil war, Nepal's Himalayan tourism industry collapsed. Some activists think that sex tourism is replacing it. According to John Frederick, an expert on South Asia's sex trade, “Ten years ago the sex industry was underground in Nepal. Now it's like Bangkok, it's like Phnom Penh.”

The war, which put much of rural Nepal under the control of Maoist insurgents, has increased the supply of sex workers. Srijana is from the poor and still violent district of Siraha in southern Nepal. She was widowed there two years ago, and left an infant son to come to the capital. Yet she is remarkably cheerful—perhaps because she is drunk, and the shower is not working.

Interesting Article on Cabin Restaurants!

NEPAL: Cabin waitresses subjected to sexual exploitation KATHMANDU, 20 June (IRIN) - "I constantly wish I could be run over by a car and killed," said Rekha Biswakarma, a traumatised waitress, who works at a cabin bar in the capital, Kathmandu. She was raped by a client and threatened by her employer to keep quiet or lose her job. Her colleagues told the 20-year-old to forget the incident, warning that she would never be able to afford the court costs and had no evidence to prove the crime. But forgetting such an ordeal has proven impossible. Biswakarma has tried to commit suicide several times but stopped herself for the sake of her five-year-old daughter. Two years ago, she and her husband arrived in the capital to escape their impoverished lives in Makwanpur District where they constantly suffered food shortages for lack of income. They depended on her husband's work for a local farm and barely made US$1 a day. Her situation deteriorated in Kathmandu after her husband left her and disappeared. She had some friends working in the cabin restaurants and they offered to find her a job as a waitress but did not tell her what the job really entailed; she only found out when she was sexually abused and raped in her first week. Dangerous jobs Cabin bars, established during the mid-1990s in the capital as part of the entertainment sector, have since become venues for forced prostitution, according to local NGOs. Each bar has separate and private cabins where the waitress has to "entertain" the clients to encourage them to spend lavishly on alcohol and food. The waitresses, aged between 15 and 25, are mostly migrant workers from the villages in nearby poor districts such as Lalitpur, Dhading, Nuwakot, Sindupalchowk, Kavre and Dolakha. Most of them are barely literate, divorced, internally displaced persons and/or victims of domestic violence, according to a local NGO, Saathi, which runs a project creating a safe environment for the cabin-bar waitresses. "They should shut down all these bars or all the girls will keep on getting sexually exploited openly and without any control," said Biswakarma. She is one of thousands of waitresses in the capital who suffer severe forms of sexual exploitation, including molestation, rape and violence, at the hands of both clients and bar owners. According to the Nepal Restaurant Entrepreneurs Association, there are more than 20,000 waitresses working in 800 cabin restaurants and bars in Kathmandu. "Their stories have always remained under-reported in the media and their situation remains grossly neglected by the government," said Uma Lama, an activist from Saathi. One of the reasons why the waitresses do not get enough police and legal protection is because they are often portrayed as commercial sex workers in the local tabloids, she explained. Lama, who has worked on protecting the cabin waitresses for eight years, says she has met scores of women like Biswakarma who have been raped or sexually abused. Most continue with their jobs because they have no alternative. Re-training programmes "A lot of my friends became sex workers after they were raped, abused and forced to have sex with clients because they felt there was nobody to protect them and it was better to agree and make a better income," said Sabita Chettri, a former cabin waitress. Chettri was rescued by Saathi and provided with temporary shelter and training as a masseuse; she now works at Himalayan Healers [see: http://www.himalayanhealers.org/], an eminent spa centre, which is also helping to provide jobs to sexually exploited waitresses. Saathi has been helping 200 waitresses through its Gainful Employment Programme, which started in 2007, and trains them in security work, clinical care assistance, care-giving, massage, painting, driving, tailoring and as beauticians. Private companies have also joined up with Saathi to provide them with jobs after their training. Recently, the NGO helped to rescue 55 waitresses, 32 of whom were younger than 16. "The crimes against these women are so horrendous inside the cabins that we are often in tears when these victims tell us their stories," said Sulaksana Rana, an activist from Saathi, who also works as a counsellor. "Most are extremely vulnerable as they lack protection and are very poor and have to survive on the sympathy of the clients, who are ruthless and dangerous," Rana explained.