Asian domestic workers report staggering abuse
Sriatik’s body bears multiple scars. She has no idea what caused the long red line across her face or the large marks on her back. She only remembers something hot that her male employer was holding. She recalls it was “like he had the devil inside.”
She was 19 when she first left her Indonesian village to work overseas as a maid, cook and nanny, as many young women from her area had done. Sriatik worked for a family in Taiwan for two years and returned home, satisfied it was a good experience. When the man telephoned and asked her to return, she happily agreed. That’s when her nightmare began, starting with her employer pressing a heated fork onto her hand, followed by kickings and beatings along with constant verbal abuse.
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© Steve McCurry / Magnum Photos
Anis, 25, abused in Hong Kong
What is additionally shocking is that Sriatik’s experience is not uncommon. She was just one of 24 former or current domestic workers who agreed to be photographed and tell their stories to expose the inhumane, slave-like conditions that many domestic workers endure behind locked doors in households around the world.
Steve McCurry, the famed photographer known for the iconic “Afghan girl” portrait that appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine, contributed the photos as part of the International Labor Organization-funded exhibition project, No One Should Work This Way.
Among the other workers photographed is Haryatin, 34, who is now blind after being beaten and abused by her female employer in Saudi Arabia. Anis, 25, from Indonesia, had been in Hong Kong only a few days when her employer tried to slice off her fingers with a butcher’s knife. Pavitra, a mother of four, spent five months in jail in Oman because her employer refused to believe that her husband, a police official, had raped the housemaid and made her pregnant. She returned to Nepal in secret to give up the child for adoption, fearful her family would disown her if they knew what had happened to her.
McCurry and this writer traveled to Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines and Hong Kong to document the evidence from former domestic workers. As well as physical and mental abuse we found child labor, forced labor, human trafficking, rape, starvation, excessive working hours, little or no pay, and no freedom of movement. A few of the people we met had been abused in their own country while the others had migrated elsewhere in Asia or to the Gulf states. The victims were female and male, young and old, educated and illiterate (and their abusers were equally varied). What linked them was a toxic combination of desperation, born out of poverty, and a lack of legal protection — in most countries, domestic workers are not protected by employment laws. In some societies, they are treated as “property” and not as individuals or even workers entitled to equal treatment and rights.
The project is part of an international campaign encouraging governments to ratify a new ILO Convention that specifically covers the rights of domestic workers. The ILO, which is the United Nations’ specialized agency dealing with work-related issues, estimates there are 52 million domestic workers in the world and more than 21 million in Asia and the Pacific. Convention No. 189 has only been ratified by 14 countries, and by just one, the Philippines, in the Asia-Pacific region.
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