Nepali freelance journalist Rojita Adhikari brings issues of life and death in her country to a global audience.
She writes about the thousands of Nepalese women go to the Middle East to earn money for their families - living in slave-like conditions.
She's also covered child trafficking, childbirth mortality rates and abortion services for women in impoverished rural areas. Her work appears internationally in publications including The Guardian, The New York Times and the BBC World Service.
Producer Lynn Freeman caught up with Adhikari while she was in Nepal.
Adhikari says she’s seen many cases of children being bought from families who are told they will be married. Instead, the children end up in prostitution in places like Kathmandu.
She wants to raise awareness so that families understand what could happen to their daughters. She says many of them believe marriage to be a safe option for their kids.
She says that in some cases agencies will rescue the girls and bring them home, but their families will not accept them. Adhikari says she’s only ever seen one or two cases where the family will take back their daughter.
“Once trafficked, the family think this is a disgrace and they will not accept it. The girls have to manage by themselves.”
She says they are also shunned by their wider communities and cannot find work or earn money. Some of them have no choice but to go back to the prostitution they were saved from.
Adhikari has also extensively reported on Nepalese women who are being trafficked to Gulf states as domestic workers, or more accurately, as domestic slaves. However, she has reported on some positive cases on women making better lives for themselves.
“Here there is no job, nothing to do, no food to eat. If she finds a good job, good house, nice people, she can earn $300 a month in the Gulf and send money home.”
However, in other cases, women are raped and beaten by their landlord and are often unpaid.
More locally, Adhikari has reported on the issue of period huts in rural areas of Nepal.
In traditional Hindu society, women who have their period are deemed impure and must stay out of the house for four days.
She says the huts the women must stay in are often tiny and windowless and women frequently die when they are in them from things like snakebites or suffocation. Women often can’t leave the doors to the huts open because men come and rape them, she says.
Period huts are now illegal in Nepal, but Adhikari says the law is difficult and in some cases impossible to enforce.
Adhikari says that while attitudes are changing among younger Nepalese, they are also leaving the country in droves for work or study opportunities abroad.
