KATHMANDU, NEPAL -- Shanti Rokka, 21, came to Kathmandu from Jhapa, an eastern district of Nepal, with the dream of earning enough money to provide a better life for her family. But Rokka quickly realized that Kathmandu had little to offer her. After struggling for more than a year to find a job and earn a decent wage, she finally found work at a cabin restaurant.
It is six in the evening. Restaurants in the alleys of Baneshwor, a central area of Kathmandu, are getting ready to welcome another colorful evening. In an alley just off the main road is Samman Restaurant and Bar, a cabin restaurant. In cabin restaurants, the hall is partitioned into tiny cubicles so that the waitresses can sit with customers and perform sexual favors for the customers in relative privacy.
Inside the restaurant, several waitresses stand before a counter applying make-up, powder, lipstick and cream to their faces. Rokka wears less make-up than the others. She is sitting at a corner table with melancholy expression, her face cupped in her hands. Tonight she is dressed in a red kurta. She is wearing red lipstick, red nail polish and she has a red tika on her forehead.
As the restaurant opens and patrons begin to filter in the sounds of laughter and flirting emanate from the cabins where the curtains are already drawn. From the outside, the restaurant looks simple with dark doors and windows. But the interior is decorated with colorful bulbs, posters of Hollywood and Bollywood celebrities, and artificial flowers. Near the entrance door is a cash counter where a woman sits. She is busy receiving telephone calls and instructing the waitresses to lure the customers to order the most expensive drinks and large amounts of food.
At seven in the evening, the restaurant is crowded and the waitresses near the counter look more desperate to attract clients. There are about 12 male customers in the restaurants tonight, each trying to coax the best-looking waitresses into their cabins. Among them, six patrons have already occupied three of the cabins, while the rest are sitting outside talking to a group of waitresses.
Rokka has been working in the restaurant for one year now. She begins her job everyday at 9 a.m. Throughout the day she serves customers with food and beverages, and at the orders of her employer, she also provides patrons with sexual gratification. When she sits in the cabin partition with a patron her job is to encourage him to order drinks and food while allowing him to grope her. Rokka said customers grab, kiss, fondle and molest her. She said many even ask for masturbation and oral sex. For these services the waitresses are tipped by customers, but there is no standard gratuity and no guarantee a customer will tip. “Some customers give one hundred [rupees] while some generous ones even give us 500 rupees, about $7,” Rokka said.
Rokka hates her work. But she is resigned to her “fate.“ She believes she has no choice but to suffer in silence. “I have become like a toy to the customers because I didn’t have money to buy food. Who would do such work willingly?“ Rokka asked.
While the Nepali law does not allow cabin and dance restaurants to operate sex businesses, officials said that many restaurants register under the Cottage Industry Act as a restaurant then, after registration, begin offering sex to clients.
According to the Nepal Restaurant Entrepreneure’s Association, there are 700 cabin restaurants registered in Kathmandu, and officials estimate that there are likely several hundred more that are unregistered. The NREA said that cabin restaurants employ more than 30,000 women in Kathmandu.
The problem of sexual harassment in cabin restaurants is heightened because there is no practical enforcement to curb the sex trade in Kathmandu. Prostitution is not legal in Nepal, but there aren’t any specific laws prohibiting it either. Meera Dhungana of The Forum for Women, Law and Development, a local nongovernmental organization, said, “Occasionally the police do raid some of the restaurants and arrest the customers, owners and waitresses for running sex businesses. However they are released after a few hours without any charge or fine.”
According to a survey conducted in 2004 by SAATHI, a local NGO working to reduce violence against women, women tend to work in cabin restaurants mostly due to illiteracy, poverty, domestic violence and unemployment. Sulkchhana Shrestha, the program coordinator for SAATHI said “Many girls who came to Kathmandu from rural villages have no education and job skills and a cabin restaurant is the only place that will employ them. So they are forced to go there.”
According to SAATHI, 15 percent of the women who work in cabin restaurants are between the ages of 12 to 14 and 40 percent are between the ages of 15 to 22.
“The women working [in these restaurants] don’t have anywhere else to go. They cannot article the sexual abuses they face due to lack of awareness and poverty,” said Shrestha.
Rokka, like many of the girls who end up working in cabin restaurants, came from a poor family in the eastern part of Nepal. She grew up in a small home, roofed with straw. Her parents and 17-year-old sister work as daily wage laborers there. When her mother became ill two years ago, she said it was difficult for the family to provide her with the medication and proper care that she needed. So Rokka left her village and came to Kathmandu hoping to find work. After 45 days of searching for a job Rokka said she found employment in a carpet factory. She earned 1,100 rupees, about $16, per month which was not sufficient to sustain herself in the city and still send money back to her family. “My parents expected money from me [but] it was difficult even to manage two meals a day,” she said.
After struggling to get by on her salary at the carpet factory for a year, she said she learned about cabin restaurants through a friend. “I had to do any kind of work to survive,” Rokka said.
Rokka said she came to the restaurant to be a waitress, but was quickly initiated into the world of prostitution. “Clients force us to drink alcohol. We have to do whatever they say or else they don’t pay the money. If they call us at night, we also have to go [home] with them,” she said.
At the Samman Cabin Restaurant Rokka earns 5,000 rupees, about $72, every month of which she is now able to send about 2,000 rupees, $29, to her mother.
But even with her higher salary, Rokka still struggles to make ends meet. She said when she runs into financial trouble, she often spends the night with her clients from the restaurant. Payment for sex outside the restaurant is not fixed, though Rokka said she normally charges between 1,000 to 2,500 rupees, $14 to $36, per night.
“I have to go wherever the client wants even without thinking what kind of person he is. There are some people who do not pay after they have sex with us and to add to it, they use abusive language in the morning to shoo us away,” she said.
Rokka said she wants to quit her job in the restaurant. She wants to start a job where she will be respected. The social pressures of sex work in Nepal force Rokka to change her rented house every two to four months in fear of being ousted if a landlord finds out her profession.
Rokka’s mother is still unaware of her daughter’s profession and the source of the supplemental income she receives every month. Rokka said her mother pressures her to find an eligible man to marry, but she is not interested in marriage. “What is the use of getting married? My husband will leave me as soon as he knows about my profession.”
Experts in the human rights sector here say that despite the popularity of cabin restaurants in Kathmandu among men, the women who work in the restaurants have to bear the disgrace and discrimination silently. “We have nowhere to go to complain,” Rokka confirmed.
While many people and organizations in Nepal are raising their voices in opposition to cabin restaurants and the sex industry, many say the answer to the problem may not be as simple as just closing down the restaurants. A professor from the central sociology department at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Dr. Fanendra Paudel, said the country needs more regulations for the restaurants and an effort to inform the women working in the sex trade as to what their rights are. “The government should frame clear legal provisions to regulate and control this profession,” he said.
Yagya Prasad Adhikary, the departmental head of the National Human Rights Commission, NHRC, agreed. He considers the incidents of sexual abuse in the cabin restaurants as serious human rights abuses. ”The government should immediately issue a law against sexual harassment in the workplace and punish people that commit such abuses,” he said.
Two nongovernmental organizations here, FWLD and Pro Public, have taken more concrete action to make such laws a reality. In 2002, they filed a writ at the Supreme Court petitioning the court to frame a law that would reduce all kinds of sexual abuses against the women in the workplace. The Supreme Court issued a directive to make sexual harassment in the workplace illegal in 2004, but the law has not been formally drafted or enacted yet.
Mahendra Prasad Shrestha, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Women and Social Welfare, said, ”The process of law making is in the final stage. Its draft is already submitted to the parliament and it will be issued within a month.”
But even if the laws are enacted, enforcement will likely remain minimal. The owner of Samman Cabin Restaurant, who asked that her name not be used for fear of legal action, denies that the women who work for her are being sexually exploited. She said she does not force any of the waitresses to perform sexual behaviors.
“We have not forced any of the workers. But their job demands them to make their customers happy,“ she said. She did admit that she knows customers often take the waitresses outside the restaurants to have sex for money. “Some [waitresses] behave well and some don’t,“ she said.
Meera Dhungana of FWLD said she is hopeful that the parliament will pass the long awaited sexual harassment bill to protect women like Rokka from being sexually exploited at their workplaces. The new law would obligate the employer to ensure the safety of their female employees from all kinds of sexual exploitation. Moreover, the bill has the provision to provide compensation to the victims. “After the implementation of the bill, the cabin restaurant owners cannot get away with exploiting their workers sexually,“ Dhungana said.
The story you are reading was published on Monday September 10, 2012. To read more recent stories click here.