Nepal
Nepal was the original maker of the myth of trafficking in the regional and international community. Gita and her drugged Frooti established the precedent in South Asia for heart- and wallet-wrenching sensationalism. The persistence of the myth has put Nepals discourse significantly behind that of other South Asian countries. While the majority of attention on trafficking is placed on several "danger districts", which happen to surround Kathmandu Valley, it is painfully obvious that these sparsely-populated districts cannot account for the large number of Nepali girls and women selling sex in India. Nepal has a number of maturing rural NGOs which have significant knowledge of trafficking patterns across the country, but their knowledge has generally been ignored because the trafficking arena is dominated by Kathmandu-based "power NGOs" and international donors in their thrall.
The perception of "trafficking" has evolved very little over the last decade. Among NGOs and government people, there is a strong denial of families direct, willing involvement in selling their children; in general, families are conceived to have been either duped or coerced by abject poverty. Those fighting trafficking almost universally deny that the girls involved may have prior knowledge that they are going to enter sex work. In-country trafficking is ignored, despite evidence from grassroots NGOs and international-NGOS that traffickers are "shopping" in the hills for girls to serve in the brothels of Biratnagar, Kathmandu and Pokhara.
Recently, the matter of migrant labour has entered the consciousness of Nepali discussants. As in Sri Lanka, there is concern that migrant women workers unwittingly enter prostitution. Unlike in Sri Lanka, the number of women migrants, their destinations and their level of welfare are still largely unknown. Filling the vacuum, the media are beginning to play "I was raped by my boss" tapes, which promise to monopolise the trafficking discourse, drowning out other significant issues of female migrant labour. As with Nepali girls knowing entry into prostitution in Nepal and India, activists are mute about the Nepalis willingly seeking sex work overseas, despite public knowledge that for years Nepali women have been going for sex work in Hong Kong, Japan and Korea.