KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 28 — For two and a half years, Mahi Ramakrishnan spent every night at different brothels in the city centre.

She was making a documentary on underage prostitution that was released last September.

The 45-year-old film-maker, who is a USA Today correspondent, says she hung out with two pimps — an Indian woman and a Chinese man — smoking and drinking beer with them for years to gain their trust and access to the seedy underworld.

Mahi says she might not take such risks now at her age. This, however, was not her first foray into dangerous subjects.

An investigative journalist working in the field for 19 years and a film-maker for six, she has covered baby traffickers, arms smugglers, militants in southern Thailand and Indonesia, refugees in Myanmar, and even the Tamil Tigers separatist rebel group in Sri Lanka.

In the future, she plans to make a film in India about child sex and child marriage, focusing on the different generations of a single family. Mahi says it would be easier to do it in India than in Malaysia as she has friends in the industry there. 

Here, Mahi talks about her fears when making the documentary Trapped and the complex, yet fascinating, world of prostitution in Malaysia.

In her own words: