Estimating Young Women Working in Kathmandu’s Adult Entertainment Sector: A Hybrid Application of Respondent Driven Sampling and Venue Site Sampling

ABSTRACT

This study estimates the prevalence of young women, defined as women aged 17 and younger, working in Kathmandu Valley’s adult entertainment sector. A hybrid strategy based on respondent-driven sampling and venue-based studies, giving rise to a mark-recapture estimation strategy, was applied. A sample of 600 female workers were reached through respondent driven sampling, and a sub-sampled set of female workers surveyed within the sampled venues. This unique method was intended to reach the “hidden” population and generate a representative sample, and enable an inference procedure which could overcome the limitations present with either strategy. The resulting estimation procedure made use of elaborate sample weighting schemes, multiple imputation-based procedures, and mark-recapture estimation procedures in order to obtain efficient estimates of the population size and characteristics. The resulting estimation was that the population of young women working in adult entertainment venues in the Kathmandu Valley is 1,650, or approximately 17% of all women in this service sector. This study constitutes the most statistically rigorous estimation of young women working in the adult entertainment sector in the Kathmandu Valley to date, and can serve as a baseline for future anti-human trafficking interventions and may guide the methodology of future studies.

KEY WORDS:

• Child Abuse
• Crime
• Sexual Abuse
• Quantitative Methods
• Statistics

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical Approval

The data collection procedures that this paper is based on were reviewed and approved by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Institutional Review Board.

Informed Consent

All subjects received IRB approved informed consent prior to the interviews. Recruitment and subject consent procedures were approved by the IRB at John Jay College for Criminal Justice.

Notes

¹ Nepal’s dohori restaurants aim to reproduce festive rural environments in urban areas, with folk music and dance performances onstage, and opportunities for restaurant guests to sing and dance themselves.

² Recall that, in this study, young women refers to individuals aged 17 and younger.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Freedom Fund.