Today, in the NYTimes:
Immigrant Maids Flee Lives of Abuse in Kuwait
...Rosflor Armada, who is staying in the Philippines Embassy, said that last year during Ramadan, she cooked all day for the evening meal and was allowed to sleep only about two hours a night. “They said, ‘You will work. You will work.’ ” She said that she left after her employers demanded that she wash the windows at 3 a.m.
The existence of the shelters reflects a hard reality here: With few legal protections against employers who choose not to pay servants, who push them too hard, or who abuse them, sometimes there is nothing left to do but run...human rights groups say the potential for mistreatment is acute in several countries in the Middle East, especially those with large numbers of migrant workers who rely on a sponsorship system that makes employers responsible for the welfare of their workers.
That system is particularly entrenched in Kuwait, where oil riches allow many families to have several servants, human rights advocates say. And conditions for some workers here are bad enough that the United States Department of State in a 2010 report singled out Kuwait, along with 12 other countries, for failing to do enough to prevent human trafficking.
The report noted that migrants enter Kuwait voluntarily, but “upon arrival some are subjected to conditions of forced labor by their sponsors and labor agents, including through such practices as nonpayment of wages, threats, physical or sexual abuse, and restrictions on movement, such as the withholding of passports.”
...The perils faced by many domestic workers were brought into sharp focus in recent weeks, when the local news media reported that a Sri Lankan maid who fled to her embassy said she had been imprisoned by her Kuwaiti employers, without pay, for 13 years...Also last month, the news media reported that a Filipino maid was allegedly tortured and killed by her employers, who the media said ran over her body with a car in the desert in order to make her death look like an accident.
Human rights advocates say the problem of abuse persists because it is rarely punished...In 2009, embassies in Kuwait received more than 10,000 complaints from domestic workers about unpaid wages, long working hours and physical, sexual and psychological abuse...Alida Ali, a 22-year-old from the Philippines, described a different kind of punishment. She begged her agency to move her from an abusive family, and when her employers found out, she said, they threw her out of a third-floor window, breaking her back...
Stories from Lebanon.
From Pakistan.
In Jordan.
In Israel, it seems local men are marrying the immigrant domestic labor force.
Is that another form of abuse?
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