HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

Violence against Child Domestic Workers

 

More girls are employed in domestic work than in any other form of child labor. They are exploited and abused on a routine basis, yet are nearly invisible among child laborers. They work alone in individual households, hidden from public scrutiny, their lives controlled by their employers.  
 
Child domestic workers may be subjected to verbal and physical abuse, and are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and sexual violence from men and boys living in or associated with the household. Child domestic workers often are confined to their employer’s household, without access to any outside source of help. Many feel they must remain silent about the violence they endure, due to financial pressures and debts that make them afraid to lose their employment.  
 
Since 2001, Human Rights Watch has conducted investigations on abuses against child domestic workers originating from or working in El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, and Togo.  
 
 
Physical Abuse  
 
If I did something the employer didn’t like, she would grab my hair and hit my head on the wall. She would say things like, “I don’t pay you to sit and watch TV! You don’t wash the dishes well. I pay your mother good money and you don’t do anything [to deserve it].”… Once I forgot clothes in the washer and they started to smell so she grabbed my head and tried to stick it in the washing machine.  
  
—Saida B., child domestic worker, age fifteen,  
Casablanca, Morocco
 
 
Physical violence against child domestic workers ranges from slaps to severe beatings using implements such as shoes, belts, sticks or household implements; knocking heads against walls; and burning skin with irons, among other forms of violence.  
 
Zubeida, a sixteen-year-old girl in Indonesia, said, “My employer came from behind – she kicked me. I was kicked twice on my lower back. She was wearing wooden sandals. She shouted at me and said that I was lazy and not working hard enough. She pointed to the clothes and said they were not washed properly. She slapped me on my left cheek. I was in a lot of pain and could not walk properly. My back really hurt. My employer had slapped me before [and] I would apologize to her if I made a mistake, but it made no difference.”  
 
Employers often use physical violence in response to mistakes, minor accidents, or minor infractions such as cleaning poorly or responding slowly to an order. Najat Z., an eleven-year-old domestic worker in Morocco, told Human Rights Watch, “If something broke, like dishes or a glass, they would tell me they would take the money out of my pay and they beat me. They used an electrical cord . . . Both the husband and the wife were mean to me.” When fifteen-year-old Putri in Indonesia was unable to remove the dirt trapped between the bathroom tiles, her employer poured a cleanser containing hydrochloric acid on her right hand and arm, resulting in discoloration of the skin, burns, and permanent scarring.  
 
Abena R., a ten-year-old from Ghana who was trafficked into Togo, was badly beaten by her employer for not obeying an order immediately: “[M]y boss yelled at me and beat me with a stick, she broke my hand. She didn’t take me to the hospital.” The nongovernmental organization (NGO) providing shelter to Abena said her hand was paralyzed and might never heal.  
 
One of the most common forms of mistreatment that serves to reinforce the inferiority of child domestic workers’ status in the household is the withholding of food, or providing poor quality or rotten food. In some cases, domestic workers are literally starved, and forced to steal food—and suffer sometimes brutal consequences if discovered—or to rely on the kindness of neighbors and others for basic sustenance. This treatment becomes a form of physical and psychological abuse.  
 
In Morocco, Najat Z., eleven, told Human Rights Watch, “I ate lentils or loubia [bean stew], and the family ate meat.” In Indonesia, girls reported being given food only once a day or stale and leftover food. For example, Vina, who began domestic work when she was thirteen, said her employer “would give me food once a day, but if I ate more than that she would shout at me and call me ‘pig.’ I was hungry, that’s why I would take a little more food.”  
 
 
Sexual Harassment and Assault  
 
“The señor wanted to take advantage of me, he followed me around. . . he grabbed my breasts twice from behind while I was washing clothes in the pila. I yelled, and the boy came out, and the señor left. I didn’t tell the señora, because I was afraid. I just quit.”  
 
- María A. Guatemala, describing an incident when she was fourteen or fifteen
 
 
Child domestic workers are at increased risk of sexual harassment and assault. The true dimensions of sexual violence against women and girl domestic workers may never be known; under-reporting is likely to be significant due to workers’ isolation and the deep social stigma attached to sexual assault. In many countries, Human Rights Watch found that girls endured sexual violence because they were unable to escape, felt acute financial pressure to remain in their jobs, or were under threat of greater harm if they did report. Workers who did denounce their victimizers were often fired and, in the case of migrant domestic workers, immediately repatriated.  
 
Sexual harassment of domestic workers has been characterized as a “widespread phenomenon” in Latin America. An ILO-IPEC study in El Salvador revealed that 15.5 percent of girl domestic workers who had changed employers had left their previous employment because of sexual harassment or abuse, making such abuse the second leading cause for leaving a position. In Guatemala, one-third of the adult domestic workers we interviewed had suffered some kind of unwanted sexual approaches and/or demands by men living in or associated with the household, most of them when they were adolescents in their first jobs.  
 
Other domestic workers suffer repeated rape. Dian in Indonesia began working for her cousin when she was thirteen years old. Her salary, one million rupiah (U.S.$111) a year, was paid directly to her mother. Dian told us:  
 
We lived in a very small house. The husband slept in the warung [restaurant] and I slept with the female employer. It happened three months after I started working… It was 4 a.m. and I was still sleeping. He came into the room. I was forced to have sex with him. He threatened me. He said he would hit me if I told anyone. He told me that he would throw me out and my mother would get no money. He would come to me three times a week whenever his wife was not home. This happened for three years. I was scared, but I wanted to support my mother.
 
 
Other child domestic workers told Human Rights Watch about experiences of sexual violence or harassment, but very few made a complaint, even to other members of the employer’s household. Most either endured the abuse, or simply looked for another job.  
 
 
Psychological Abuse  
 
In the beginning, she [my boss] was nice to me, but then she changed. Any time I did something wrong, she would shout at me and insult me. Sometimes she would tell her friends what I had done, and they would come over and beat me. . . . She would curse me and say I had no future.  
 
- Assoupi H., sixteen, a child domestic worker in Togo
 
 
Almost without exception, the domestic workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch around the world suffered some form of psychological abuse. Verbal abuse—harsh insults, threats and belittlement—often accompanies physical abuse and takes place in an overall context of excessive workloads, sleep deprivation, insufficient or poor quality food, and substandard living conditions. This treatment reinforces employers’ domination and control over domestic workers, making them less likely to resist or seek redress for abusive employment conditions.  
 
Lastri, a fifteen-year-old domestic worker in Indonesia, told us, “I did not like my employer because she would shout at me, call me a ‘Tai’ [shit] and ‘Anjing’ [dog]. I did not feel comfortable. Why am I being treated this way? I could not stand my employer’s treatment of me.”  
 
Forced Labor  
 
I took care of two children. . . . I cleaned all parts of the house, washed the floor, washed clothes, ironed, cleaned the walls, and washed the car. I cleaned two houses, because I also cleaned the grandmother’s house. I worked from 4 a.m. to 7 p.m. I had no rest during the day. I worked everyday and was not allowed to go out, not even to walk on the street. The lady employer yelled at me everyday. She slapped me one or two times a week. My employer kept my passport. I was scared to run away without my passport. I wanted to run away, but I was afraid the Malaysian government and security would catch me.  
  
-Srihati H., seventeen years old, former Indonesian migrant domestic worker in Malaysia  
 
Some child domestic workers in Morocco and Indonesia described situations amounting to forced labor. They are locked in their employers’ houses and forbidden to interact with children their own age. Some employers withhold salaries for extended periods to ensure that child domestic workers do not have the financial resources to leave their jobs and return home.  
 
Ira, who was fifteen when she began working as a domestic in Indonesia, said that when she told her employer she wanted to leave, her employer stopped paying her wages:  
 
When I told her that I wanted to stop working, the female employer said, “No, [you] cannot leave.” Before that she paid me every month and then when I told her that I would leave, she stopped paying me. After that, she made me clean the bathroom two or three times a day, even when it was clean. She watched me clean the bathroom and made me scrub the walls. My hand would get tired and would dry out from being in the water too much.
 
 
Salwa L., in Morocco, told us that when she was seventeen, her employer refused to pay her money owed when she wanted to quit after being beaten on the head with a stick, and threatened to bring the police to make her pay the fee the employer had paid to the broker.  
 
Merpati, who was fifteen when she worked for an Indonesian employer who locked her indoors, said, “The employer forbade me from going out of the house or contacting my family. She would lock the door from the outside. She said that I would be protected if the door was locked. At first I felt okay, but then I felt confined. I was home all day and never went outside.”  
 
Trafficking  
 
There was a woman who came to the market to buy charcoal. She found me and told my mother about a woman in Lomé who was looking for a girl like me to stay with her and do domestic work. She came to my mother and my mother gave me away. The woman gave my mother some money, but I don’t know how much.  
 
-Kéméyao A., child trafficking victim, age ten, Lomé, Togo, May 14,  
2002  
 
Girls recruited into domestic work may become victims of trafficking in persons. In Malaysia, Human Rights Watch interviewed nine women and girls who had been trafficked into forced labor. Some had been promised jobs in domestic work but ended up working in restaurants, retail stores or on food stalls without any payment of wages; others ended up as domestic workers, again without payment of wages, although they had been assured other types of employment.  
 
In research on trafficking of Togolese girls into domestic and market work, Human Rights Watch interviewed forty-one girls trafficked when they were between the ages of three and seventeen. Thirteen had been trafficked internally, while the rest were trafficked across borders to Benin, Gabon, Ghana, Nigeria, and Niger. All of the girls Human Rights Watch interviewed were from poor agricultural backgrounds with little or no formal schooling whose parents handed them over to known or unknown intermediaries, sometimes for a price, with the understanding they would be receiving formal education, professional training or paid work. Instead, the girls’ descriptions of being recruited, transported, received and exploited revealed a pattern of abuse resembling child slavery. Almost none received any remuneration for her work.  
 
Assoupi H., a sixteen-year-old Togolese domestic worker, was trafficked when she was only three years old. Her employer, she said, “told my mother she would put me in school, but she gave birth to twins and told me I had to help her look after the children until they were old enough for school. I was only three years old, but I carried her babies and held them for her.” By the time her children reached school age, Assoupi’s employer was pregnant with twins again. “She asked me to take care of them, too,” Assoupi recalled. “I had to fetch water for the house, sweep, wash the dishes and wash clothes. I would bathe the children, cook for them and wash their clothes. When they were young, they cried a lot.”  
 
Kafui A. was eleven when her mother sent her to Lomé to work as a domestic servant. “I didn’t want to go,” she told Human Rights Watch. “I knew that when people brought children there, they mistreated them. My mother told me I would be going to stay with a relative and she would not mistreat me.” In reality, Kafui was kicked and beaten regularly by her employer’s son, and on at least one occasion her employer beat her and threatened to beat her to death.  
 
 
Recommendations to Governments:  
 

From: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/02/20/global15343.htm

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