ABSTRACT
The primary purpose of the former was to understand the social, cultural, and political factors that lead women to work in Nepal's sex and informal entertainment sector. This allowed the key factors that eventually drove the study participants to enter the highly vulnerable sex and informal entertainment industry to be identified and contextualised, and it provided a nuanced understanding of their motivations and personal circumstances prior to doing so. The authors advocate for partial decriminalisation and a pro-work model and argue that a combination of these can strike a balance between a woman's human rights approach to regulating sex work, punishing and preventing exploitation, and supporting and recognising empowerment and autonomy. This research noted that the women who participated have often undergone deep trauma as children or adolescents, but as the questions of this research were not originally designed to explore such trauma, its impact on the mental or physical well-being of the participants has only been touched upon.
