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Domestic Servants Worldwide Suffer Physical and Psychological Abuse

Many domestic workers across the world endure conditions akin to slavery, from physical and psychological abuse to working for months without pay and being locked up.

Human Rights Watch called on governments to make sure domestic workers receive the same legal protections as other employees and to hold their bosses and labor agents accountable for abuse. "Migrants and children especially risk abuse," said Nisha Vary, a senior researcher from the group, adding that governments need to "better regulate working conditions, detect violations and impose meaningful civil and criminal sanctions."

The New York-based group, which looked at domestic workers in and from a dozen nations from Asia, to Africa, to the Middle East, said it carried out interviews with hundreds of victims, employees, labor agents and aid workers between 1999 and 2005. The findings were published in a report titled "Swept Under the Rug: Abuses Against Domestic Workers Around the World." Some said they worked up to 19 hours a day, endured rape and other forms of sexual abuse, were deprived of adequate nutrition, or were forced to forgo up to 10 months of their salaries putting them into debt before they started working.

"In the worst situations, women and girls are trapped ... or have been trafficked into forced domestic work in conditions akin to slavery," said Human Rights Watch, acknowledging that the prevalence of abuse is hard to estimate in part because of a lack of reporting mechanisms. Types of physical abuse outlined in the 93-page report ranged from slaps to severe beatings to using shoes or belts, knocking heads against walls, or burning skins with irons. Some women said they were repeatedly threatened. "Twice I lost consciousness as a result of the beatings," Tit Hashanah, one of an estimated 200,000 Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia, was quoted as saying. "The first time it was raining and there was leak in the house and I forgot to put a bowl out (to catch the water). She hit me with a mop. The second time, when I washed the clothes and the color ran."

Human Rights Watch noted that there are approximately 200 million migrants worldwide - roughly half of them women _ and for many developing countries the "export" of labor is increasingly important for cutting unemployment rates and boosting economic growth via the money they send home. The most popular destinations for migrants from Asia has shifted in recent decades from the Middle East to countries in their own region that have seen booming economies, the report said. But allegations of abuse - especially in Saudi Arabia - of foreign workers continue, with the Indonesian, Sri Lankan and Philippine embassies handling thousands of complaints every year. "It was like a bad dream," a migrant worker from the Philippines said of his experiences in Saudi Arabia, where the lives of migrant workers are further complicated by deeply rooted gender, religious, and racial discrimination.

The report looks at the country's criminal justice system through the eyes of families and friends of migrants, some of whom were allegedly arbitrary arrested and tortured, and sentenced to prison terms following faulty trials. Some were executed, it said. "We have no more tears, our tears have all dried up," a woman in a village in India was quoted as saying after her son was reportedly beheaded following a secret trial in Jeddah.

The report also looked at tens of thousands of mostly female migrants who have arrived in the United States in the last decade with special temporary visas, and considered the roughly one million children trafficked worldwide for sexual exploitation or forced labor. Hundreds of young boys and girls are trafficked every year from the West African nation of Togo, recruited on false promises of education, professional training and paid employment, the report said. "I made an appointment with the man to meet at night," said Dovene, who was trafficked to Nigeria when he was 17. "There were many other kids there, more than 300 of us in one truck, packed like dead bodies."

In Latin America, sexual harassment of domestic workers was characterized as a "widespread phenomenon." In Guatemala, one-third of the adult domestic workers interviewed suffered some kind of unwanted sexual approaches, most when they were adolescents in their first jobs.

Adapted from: 'Domestics servants worldwide suffer physical, psychological abuse: report', China Post, Associated Press. 27 July 2006. (Source: UNIAP Cambodia)