A Country Where Girls and Women Suffer Most from Traditional Believes During Their Cycle

   
The custom known as chaupadi isolates girls and women for the four days a month they are menstruating. An extreme level of it exists in Nepal where locals believe that they are impure to touch food utensils, to share house and to stay with them in the evenings and all the day during the time they are menstruating. They believe that they upset the Hindu gods and bring down a curse on their households if they remain indoors.   

   Girls and women in their monthly period had come with difficult situation and experienced hunger, isolation and discrimination. Many times they faced a life threaten conditions, where by some time extreme weather could led them nearly on the grave illness, and exposure to snake bites, and other human hazards.

 Nepal’s Supreme Court banned chaupadi in 2005, the practice still continues, underscoring how normalized this custom is throughout the region. Breaking down social constructs that contribute to practices such as chaupadi can be difficult. Yet we must be careful not to justify oppression in the name of respecting culture.

Although chaupadi is against the law, local authorities do not prosecute families that continue to enforce the practice or even urge them to stop. Few individuals or organizations, not even progressive groups in Nepal, are demanding that the laws banning it be followed. 

Human rights groups are making a significant move against this ill practice and United Nations defined:

 “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.”

   Although Nepal’s Supreme Court banned chaupadi in 2005, the practice still continues, underscoring how normalized this custom is throughout the region. Breaking down social constructs that contribute to practices such as chaupadi can be difficult. Yet we must be careful not to justify oppression in the name of respecting culture. 

 Source: STAT News