In Rural Nepal, Menstruation Taboo Claims Another Victim (original) (raw)

Asia Pacific|In Rural Nepal, Menstruation Taboo Claims Another Victim

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/world/asia/nepal-woman-menstruation.html

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Women and their children in a chhaupadi hut in western Nepal in September. Nepal’s government has been trying to discourage the chhaupadi tradition, in which menstruating women are banished from the home.Credit...Narendra Shrestha/European Pressphoto Agency

Jan. 10, 2018

KATHMANDU, Nepal — The last time anyone saw Gauri Kumari Bayak alive, she was gathering grass and firewood. Considered impure because she was menstruating, she was about to sleep outside in a cold hut.

She never woke up.

According to the police, Ms. Bayak is the latest victim of a very old tradition in rural Nepal, in which religious Hindus believe that menstruating women are unclean and should be banished from the family home. She was found dead on Monday, apparently having asphyxiated after building a small fire inside the hut to keep warm.

In Nepal, one of Asia’s poorest countries, dozens of women and girls have died in recent years from following this tradition, despite activists’ campaigns and government efforts to end the practice.

Menstruating women often trudge outside at night to bed down with cows or goats in tiny, rough, grass-roofed huts and sheds. Many have been raped by intruders or died from exposure to the elements.

Last summer, the Nepalese government made it illegal for anyone to force a menstruating woman or girl to sequester herself, with violators subject to jail time or fines. But the law came with a grace period to give people time to absorb the new rules, and no punishments are to be handed out until August.

All of this, of course, was too late for Ms. Bayak, 22, who has been described as a talented, highly motivated young woman. Her family said she had been teaching illiterate women to read while finishing her own high school degree, and sewing dresses at night.

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