KATHMANDU, NEPAL – Sapana Bishwokarma, 26, has a young face. She looks too young to be the mother of the 2-year-old boy who plays beside her. But she is.
The young mother is answerless when asked about the baby’s father. She says her body trembles with fear each time she recalls her son’s father. Then tears engulf her eyes and trickle down her cheeks.
“I didn’t know that man very well,” says Bishwokarma, who requested her name be changed. “He used to rape me as many times as he wanted, any given time of the day.”
Bishwokarma, of Jhapa, a district in eastern Nepal, says she moved to Saudi Arabia four years ago to work as a nanny. Her eyes moist, she says that an employment agent enticed her with the prospect of a good income.
She says she paid the agent 50,000 rupees, $700 USD, to secure the job for her. Because of a Nepali government ban on working in the Gulf, lifted just last year, she says she traveled first to India then to Saudi Arabia, where two men received her at the airport and took her to the house where she would work.
But instead of working as a nanny as promised, Bishwokarma says she was forced to work as a maid. The situation continued to deteriorate. One month into the job, she says her employer’s unmarried son raped her, with the help of three other men.
“They were a family of three with a middle-aged father and two sons,” she says. “I couldn’t even understand their language, and I was beaten up by the men.”
She says the sexual abuse didn’t stop there. Eventually, everyone in the family raped her. As she cuddles her son and pulls him onto her lap, she recalls a particular incident.
“Once, the elder son called me in his room and asked me to sit on his bed,” she says. “I refused because I was just a domestic helper there. But he forcefully pulled me to the bed, and I kept on crying for help, but no one came to my rescue. Despite using all his [force, when] he still couldn’t get control over me, he hit me with a box on my head. I became unconscious.”
She says she thinks he raped her multiple times while she was unconscious because her health started deteriorating soon after.
Bishwokarma says that in addition to using physical force, the sons also drugged her. She says that one of the employer’s sons would give her food when no one was in the house. But she says that after eating it, she would become unconscious or sleepy.
“I had to eat whatever they gave me because that would be the only food I got,” she says. “In many instances, I would just get sleepy after eating. When I would wake up, I would find out I had been raped looking at my condition.”
But she says that, most of the time, the men skipped the drugs and physically tortured her before raping her. She says she eventually got pregnant, so the elder son kicked her out and sent her back to Nepal without paying her wages.
“Now he sent me back to my country,” she says. “If this had happened to me here, I could have gone to the police, but in his country I couldn’t do so. He imprisoned me in his house and kept on raping me.”
She says she kept the story to herself for years and declined to use her real name because she fears that bringing her story into media spotlight might affect her future.
“I’ll make my son my support,” she says, wiping a tear from her eyes. “At some point of time, somehow I feel that he’ll take revenge for the injustice I had to face.”
Bishwokarma, who now earns a living as a tailor to support her son, says she doesn’t recommend any women go abroad for foreign employment.
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