In August 2023, 17-year-old Sabita lied to her mother before getting on an overnight bus to her country’s capital. She told her mother she was taking the 15-hour bus ride from her village in southwestern Nepal to go sightseeing. She said she would be back in a week.
Instead, Sabita (whose name is changed to protect her identity) took the 400-kilometer (about 250-mile) journey to start a new job. Sabita met a friend working as a waitress in a dance bar in Thamel, Kathmandu’s most famous tourist hub with a reputation for seedy late-night entertainment. The friend, whom Sabita calls Didi, which means older sister in Nepali, had promised Sabita she could get her a job with good pay at the bar.
Sabita’s story is common in Nepal. The Alliance Against Trafficking in Women and Children in Nepal, a national-level network of nearly 40 civil society organizations working against human trafficking, estimates more than 60,000 young girls and women are engaged in the adult entertainment sector. That includes dance bars, restaurants, massage parlors, khaja ghar and dohori sanjh restaurants, of which 36% are highly vulnerable to trafficking. Khaja ghars are small-scale eateries where food and alcoholic beverages are available, and dohori sanjh restaurants cater to nightlife goers, offering live folk duet music along with dance, food and beverages.
On Friday night, Oct. 6, Sabita and 10 other teenage girls were saved from two dance bars in a dark alleyway of Thamel, a tourist hub in Kathmandu, thanks to a coordinated anti-trafficking operation carried out by Opportunity Village Nepal (OVN), a non-governmental organization founded by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in 1998, with Nepal police and two other national organizations, Informal Sector Service Centre (INSEC) and Media Advocacy Group (MAG), in the adult entertainment sector.
Sr. Anthonia Soosaiappan, director of OVN said that since the launch of the project against human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Nepal in 2016 in major cities, including Pokhara, Kathmandu and Bhairahawa, OVN has reached out to more than 1,000 girls and women from the entertainment industry who are at high risk of abuse and exploitation. OVN has carried out anti-trafficking operations, providing counseling and temporary safe homes for the victims, and focusing on leadership, livelihood and reintegration into society.
“Our main focus is to raise awareness of the plights of the young girls working in the entertainment sector and help them to lead a dignified life by offering them support and skill development to change their profession,” Soosaiappan said.
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With thanks to Global Sisters Report, a project of the National Catholic Reporter (NCR), where this article originally appeared.
