Some stories of struggle are so dispiriting, so mismatched in power between attacker and victim, you can barely get through them. This one’s about widespread abuse of Sri Lankan maids in the Middle East:
More than a million Sri Lankans – roughly 1 in every 19 citizens – now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids… In Saudi Arabia, the most common destination, they call Sri Lanka “the country of housemaids.”… 15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution… Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka’s Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year…
Some of the more horrific stories:
The young scion of the Kuwait house where she worked had repeatedly tried to molest her, finally pushing her to the ground and breaking her wrist… Thangarasa Jeyanthi… had a face as purple and puffy as a plum, eyes swollen shut, burn marks on her body and dried blood still around her ears. The husband and wife she worked for had assaulted her daily… They had cut her with a knife, kicked and stomped on her, tied her hands with rope and denied her food…For Sri Lankan women, long hair is a source of pride, its absence, a source of shame. Ms. Manilariatne’s employer – her “mama” – had cut boy-short [her] hair…
And yet nobody wants to risk the remittances:
… the competition from other poor nations, notably the Philippines, which together send hundreds of thousands of women abroad each year. Too many demands for housemaids’ rights, the government fears, will simply prompt the gulf countries to seek housemaids elsewhere.
The women face cultural pitfalls:
They would even be taught that in the Muslim countries they were destined for, they should conceal that they were Buddhist or Hindu… they would learn how to dismantle a vacuum cleaner and say “toilet cleaner” in Arabic… how to turn on hot and cold water taps, how to run electrical appliances, how to navigate household hazards – the cleanser that could poison a child or the Clorox that could blind a maid.
And there are dangers at home as well:
Given the high incidence of fathers raping daughters with wives away, the housemaids were told not to entrust older girls to their fathers. An older lady was better, or even a home for girls… The trainees were warned not to send money to their husbands, lest they drink it away…
I’m a little skeptical of this claim given the powerful incest taboos in all cultures. You’d expect to see higher rates of prostitution first. Anyone have better info?
The village women emigrating have far less power than their employers. This kind of abuse is not unique to the Middle East, it’s also endemic to the U.S. and India. But the weaker state of women’s rights in countries like Saudi Arabia probably makes the situation worse.
The best solution would be for Sri Lanka to adopt economic reforms and create jobs at home so these women don’t have to emigrate in the first place.
Previous post here.
the competition from other poor nations, notably the Philippines
Seems like we should be just as concerned if the maids who are getting abused are Philipina. Maybe if these home countries get together they won’t seem quite as tiny appealing to powerful Saudi Arabia.
Sigh. Of course, American pressure would probably help more than most things, but how likely is that given our massive consumption of petroleum?
The problem here is Saudi Arabia’s barbaric and inhumane treatment of foreigners. These Saudis treat foreign workers like slaves and nobody objects.
The world needs to come together to strongly condemn barbaric Saudi culture and force Saudi Arabia to quickly start regulating the working conditions of foreigners in Saudi Arabia.
I doubt this will happen. Our elites are terrified of being called racists or imperalists. So they ignore situations like this.
I can’t believe that after such abuse, which seems widespread, people would still be willing to try their luck. What crushing powerty must it be so as to prepare one to take on one’s luck so!
The story of abuses and lack of human rights for foreigners are not new in the prosperous Arab world. Unfortunately, until their oil comes to an end, these are unlikely to cease. I mean, never mind foreginers, all their citizens don’t have the exact same rights. Add to it impoverished ‘supplier’ nations, as well as a nuvo-rich society that has not evolved in step with time, and you have the receipe for this story here.
My second post – I just read through the horrific, terrible, heartrending account of this continuously unfolding societal and personal tragedy. A must read if you have the guts for it.
What’s worse, Sri Lanka’s government is fully complicitous, ever mindful of the huge amount of money that comes home from these maids. But what a home does it come to – displaced children, broken fathers/husbands/brothers, shattered society. The government even is at hand to receive the incoming maids, carrying them off to recovery centers so they can mend a bit so as to lessen the shock on their family. And it goes on… and on…
Whatever I read bothers me. What can I do? Do you think there is something ‘I’ could do?
Is is sad to see that none of the obvious causes for the abuse are lifted. As others have pointed out, it is indeed true that such abuse of fellow humans can occur elsewehere. The high incidence of such events in the arab world is mainly because of their barbaric and primitive views of women that are only reinforced by their religion. This is not some rant fueled by blind prejudice. Statistical analysis reveals the highly endemic nature of female abuse in muslim households. Inflexible religions fade with time or spawn more tolerant flavors because they are not economically and socially sustainable. However, the presence of oil has allowed arabs to step into the twentieth century without the need for adaptation. Governmental policies ensure that arab children can remain profoundly uneducated and still live off the fruits of immigrant labor. They own businesses simply because they are born arabs, not because they are competent by any means. They are given money to give birth to more uneducated arabs. The remaining poor and disillusioned are manipulated by the religious fanatics, again funded by petrodollars. This state of affairs will not change any time soon and impotent governments like ours have no incentive to propel the change. It is a relic of a culture that will perish once it is take of its life support, the developed world’s thirst for oil.
Saudi Arabian culture is probably one of the most vile cultures that I have ever come across (all cultures has vile elements) The racism, xenophobia, bigotry, sexism in that society is second to none.
It’s not even the famous Saudi contempt for us kufrs driving this. They are equally willing to abuse their Muslim co-religionists from Indonesia and Bangladesh (as well as some of the Filipinos). They haven’t progressed far from their early days of raiding (“razzia”), plundering, slaughter, and enslavement. They’ve just got richer.
hey…did you read this week’s india abroad?
Is it the business of the United States to be concerned about the safety of foreign nationals who work in the Middle East? Absolutely not. The respective countries should protest.
On the other hand, if such maltreatment was meted out to US Citizens, there would be hell to pay. That’s why you never hear things like this happening to US citizens.
I don’t understand this irrational prejudice and contempt towards all things Islamic. Islam seems to be fueling militancy all over the world only because of the recent media scrutiny that biases its coverage. Violence occurs in cycles and is not specific to any religion; the ullster movmement, the basque nationalist insurgency, the african genocides, the colombian guerilla movement, the chinese anti-democracy purges. As for violence against women, that is the sad outcome of the the abuse of physical asymmetries and the misinterpretation of the Quran. I still maintain that women and men are fundamentally different and the Quran is right in arguing obliquely for the male control of governance. Research has shown women to be more emotional and intutive then men. This is a gift in certain aspects but a detriment when applied to situations that require logical analysis. Men excel in fields like science and sports because of their inability to acknowledge the triviality of the pursuit of excellence in their chosen area. A misconceived macroeconomic view of greater good through personal excellence is imbued in the male consciousness. Women, whom god has chosen to nurture life, realize this pursuit to be irrelevant. Their view is microeconomic, they choose to change the world one step at a time starting with their own children. Technological advances are ultimately futile, serving only to extend our lifespan so that we continue to run the rat race at an increasingly higher speed.
This is paternalist fiction. There’s nothing trivial about earning your own income– it’s the key to independence.
it’s the job of every nation to ensure human rights are respected worldwide, stupid ideas about jurisdiction and sovereign responsibility are irrelevant
and sort of related, there was this story recently in New Jersey
fixed link: click
Research has shown women to be more emotional and intutive then men
You may be wrong wrong.
I’m quite put off by the hypocrisy expressed in most of the comments on this board. To say that there is something “inherent” in Islamic “culture” (whatever that means and who is defining that) that results in the treatment of these women is ridiculous and its obvious that the comments on this board come from people who have been fed on an geographically stumped American media diet which thinks Saudi Arabia is the only country in the middle east.
The abuse of maids is endemic to all Gulf countries – Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait, Qatar, Oman…Although I barely hear any stories from the last two countries. Although most of this abuse is dished out in Arab households, there are plenty of South Asian households in the Gulf where employers see beating as an acceptable way to punish a maid. I think a number of factors lead to this awful treatment of maids, a major one being the bizarre racial/national stratifications that have developed thanks to kinds of economies in place in the Gulf, many of which are the legacies of British rule in the region. There are a number of myths and stereotypes that circulate about maids depending on the country they come from – Philipino maids, for example, are seen as manipulative, untrustworthy and active seductresses who want to marry their way out of their class background. Bangladeshi maids are characterized (thanks to their fellow South Asians) as thieves and liars and these stereotypes get more detailed even across states in India – i.e… maids from Karnataka are good, maids from Mangalore are bad…e.t.c. The one characteristic they are all seen to share is their sexual deviance, promiscuity and lack of “morals”…. Think about why they are portrayed as such… particularly in economies that where women did not traditionally have any role in waged labour. There are classic clashes here between gender ideologies and gendered labour, combined with orientalist notions of these women. Additionally, it is the conception and expectations of masculinity in Arab countries rather than of femininity and the scapegoating of South Asians by the monarchy as the cause of massive unemployment e.t..c that in some way explain the violence for me… Rationalizing rape is an almost impossible thing to do (Sarvarkar did a great job of making the rape of Muslim women seem “virtuous” while writing Six Epochs and we’re still seeing Uma Bharti and other rabid Hindutvadis drawing on his rationale) and there have to be more complex reasons and not essentialist explanations for why this takes place and how we should address it. As I’ve said in previous posts, expat communities have their hands tied because of exclusive citizenship policies which mean we all get deported and lose our existing livelihoods if we try and organize against these detestable violations of women’s bodies. I’m glad the issue is getting some attention now but its a question of political and economic evolutions in the gulf not “cultural” changes that will enable standing up against such atrocities.
SMers have written to radio stations before – why not to your own congressperson (especially those in the India Caucaus), good taxpayers and voters.
Appalling story.
Oh, goodness, ignore the spelling, please 🙂
I see we have our very own Lawrence Summers in the house.
Let me give you two examples of technological advances that refute your statements.
The first is the discovery of penicillin, which today is still THE most widely used antibiotic. You or your loved ones have no doubt benefited from this discovery, in the absence of which you could have died from a bacterial infection. You may argue that your staying alive is futile and that you “continue to run the rat race at an increasingly higher speed”, but there are those of us who feel otherwise about our loved ones and will continue our efforts to advance technology.
My second example is the “discoveries of important principles for drug treatment”. To summarize, Dr. Gertrude Elion, a female scientist, was one of the trio who were awarded the Nobel prize for this discovery. Dr. Elion’s particular contribution led to development of drugs that are used even today to treat leukemia, gout, organ rejection after transplants and certain bacterial infections. The underlying principle behind the discovery is even more useful: bacteria, viruses and cancer cells use different metabolic pathways than normal human cells to survive and thrive, and this difference can be manipulated to develop drugs that kill infections and cancers without harming healthy cells.
Dr. Elion could not have made this discovery by simply being “emotional and intuitive”, or with a “microeconomic [choice]Â… to change the world one step at a time starting with…[her] own children”, because she never had children.
This is why some of us consider technological advances NOT to be futile, and why some women are extremely qualified and very excited to be scientists, “logical analysis” and all.
I don’t want to take away from the discussion of female foreign worker abuse, but to not respond to a post like THIS?!
I think most people haven’t responded to Naveed’s post because it’s obviously sentimental pish, girl scientist. Back to the topic at hand: BB, I can understand why it’s desirable to avoid wholesale condemnations of Arab culture, but blaming the deplorable treatment of foreign maids solely on the policies of the long-departed British seems disingenuous to me. The ferocity of the violence meted out to these women suggests that economics isn’t the sole cause.
Here’s your argument :
Contempt of Islam ==> Contempt of Women
My emotional unscientific mind (do forgive me, I am female) is unable to comprehend the extremely rational argument put forth by this gentleman
The maid abuse is because human beings enjoy power and abusing the weaker species. I don’t see how being fudamentally different explains anything. You have to hide the fact that you are a Buddhist or a Hindu just to work there. Shows what a bunch of intolerant folks we are dealing with. Perhaps the religion isn’t vile, but surely the people who follow it are.
The Gulf culture is different from the larger Arab culture. The Gulfies constitute less than 20% of the Arab population.
Excellent idea, and not unprecedented. India used to limit access to South Africa during apartheid days.
vurdlife, Pakistan already has that law in place for Pakistani women who go to these countries as maids.
Naveed, Talking about crimes perpetrated by Muslims is sexy these days. So talking about crimes on women in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan is sexy. That is why you wont see New York Times posting articles about Hindu honor killings in Uttar Pradesh which might arguably be comparable in numbers to all the honor killings that happen in Pakistan. On a side note, your point about the differences between men and women is asinine at best. In your Jihad to prove the supremacy of the Quran/hadeeth and the Islamic system, you have chosen to regurgitate age old nonsense about women being more intiutive etc.,
“Amba :BB, I can understand why it’s desirable to avoid wholesale condemnations of Arab culture, but blaming the deplorable treatment of foreign maids solely on the policies of the long-departed British seems disingenuous to me. The ferocity of the violence meted out to these women suggests that economics isn’t the sole cause.”
I never said economics was the sole cause nor am I blaming it on the British. My family has been in the Gulf since the 1930’s and living in Bahrain, I’ve realized that a confluence of material conditions such as the composition of the rapidly changing labour force, the threat this poses to masculinity and contemporary revivals of historically racist, gendered notions in the Mid East and the Sub-continent among other factors force people to see themselves and others in specific ways. The “ferocity of the violence” actually does call for a deeper probing of why men in the Gulf commit such violent acts and not as you suggest looking to arab culture as an explanation despite that being undesirable. I hardly see any middle-class Arab women (who actually commit equally violent acts against their maids for the most part) running around with the marks of a violent beating or rape so obviously race/nationality is an issue in ways that no one understands yet. And please resist positing American models of understanding racial conflict on a region where it is not applicable.
And another thing… Economics and migration patterns are extremely relevant. What really annoys me is when I hear wealthy, landed South Asian Americans here saying “It’s their choice to go and work in those countries” so why are you complaining when I talk about what goes in the Mid-East. Why do so many SriLankan maids end up in the Gulf? Has anyone ever read up on the deplorable rates of alcoholism that lead to poor Srilankan men throwing hard earned money away and forcing their wives to become practically slaves in the Gulf? The awful economic situation in the sub-continent itself doesn’t really leave much “choice” for any of the workers coming to the Gulf. They’re fcuked either way – starve or take the risk of working in the gulf to put food on the table, send kids and other relatives to school…. It’s a larger problem of forced dependence..one that is changing both societies – arab and those in the sub-continent in dramatic ways which many are violently reacting to.
oops, i meant they (the wealthy SA americans or wealthy SA in the Gulf) would ask me why I was complaining whenever i brought this issue up.
Pakistan does not allow Pakistani women to go to the Gulf countries to work as maids. Other countries can adopt similar laws if they want to but have chosen not to for some reason. Once all 3rd world countries stop sending their women to the Gulf states to work as maids, the Gulf goverments would be forced to make changes.
There’s one problem with that, vurdlife: where’s their money going to come from? The maids need money. They make higher sums in the middle east than they would in their own countries. Yes, being beaten isn’t part of the deal, but what pressure can we possibly apply? Will pressure ensure that it doesn’t happen again? In fact, most expats have largely uneventful times in the gulf.
bb, I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand what you’re getting at. On one hand, you seem to think that Gulf/Arab culture is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, yet at the same time you yourself invoke ideologies of gender and class: don’t such ideologies arise out of some pre-existing cultural matrix? Bringing in a bunch of fashionable theoretical jargon doesn’t do much to clarify the issue.
Recently in Saudi Arabia 40 Pakistani Christians were arrested, imprisoned and probably tortured for practising their religion in a prvate home. The level of intolerance of other faiths is phenomenal in that country. Incidently, the Pakistani government did nothing to protest about the treatment of its citizens, and there was no objection by the Pakistani people or media in general to this incident, which is just the tip of an extremely ugly and intolerant iceberg. I suppose Pakistan is in a mental state of servitude to Saudi Arabia.
More about Sri Lankan maids in the middle east here (written by Sam Husseini — an arab american on a visit to Jordan). An excerpt :
There’s more.
This is slavery.
The Counterpunch article doesn’t seem to support this proposition (with regard to Sri Lankan maids anyway). Economic opportunity is one thing, but no country should allow its citizen to sell themselves to indentured servitude.
I’m sick of these savages mistreating our people because they think they’re better than us. Remember the post about the secret and wrongful execution of the poor desi worker? Arab culture is so backwards that it’s just ridiculous… and calling Sri Lanka “the country of housemaids”? What gives them the right to be so condescending? Think about it, most wealthy Arabs got their fortunes by being born on oil (in other words, they did NOTHING).
Arabs complain about their portrayal in the west, yet they aren’t above treating people of other races like crap. SHAME on them! With shit like this always happening, any negative coverage of the Arab world is well-deserved.
The Saudis are barbarians. They not only treat foreign maids like dirt, they treat foreigners (non arab) pretty horribly, both muslim and non-muslim. They are by far the worst in the gulf nations in this regard. For example, the mutta’wa has the authority to enter non-muslim households and punish the members if they are found worshipping their religion (i.e if they have any idols etc). I have heard of cases of Indians who have been beaten and punished because they had an idol of their god in their house.
It says a lot that some here are equating attacking saudis for their behaviour towards women == attacking Islam. I guess such people can be ignored.
Any reason why you went with the == and not the =? Because the single = would make it true while the == is conditional?
Ahh…only on sepia mutiny.
the hating on s.a. aside, i’m wondering what on earth india can do about this problem. obviously, indians wouldn’t leave in the first place if there were jobs and opportunities in india for them. instead of focusing on keeping indians safe in the middle east, maybe the focus should be keeping indians safe in india. is that even a possibility? or with a billion+ people, is spilling over just bound to happen? sometimes when i think about the logistics of attempting to solve these problems in india i become so disheartened. in a country so over-populated, so economically diverse, and so riddled with corrupt government officials, i don’t know what the future holds.
I’d be hesitant about drawing too broad conclusions about the arab world or arab culture from these articles.
It is unclear how the prevalence of abuse of maids in the middle-east compares with that in india. I have heard of cases of rape and grotesque violence perpetrated by employers against their employees in India. (I heard about one employer who literally boiled his employee alive because that employee had raped a co-worker. Also, wasn’t their a story, from a couple of years ago, about an Indian landlord in Berkeley who was involved in the mistreatment of maids that he brought from India?) But my impression is that this is the exception rather than the rule in India. And, similarly, Rahul’s impression that most expats are treated decently might well be true.
About comparing cultures: Warped notions of caste and class and color-of-skin are sadly all too prevalant in India today. Surely you can find Indians who think of their employees in the condescending terms that the Jordanian in the Counterpunch article speaks of Sri Lankans. And out of Arab culture did come an extremely egalitarian religion – Islam.
If in fact employers in india treat their employees better than in the middle-east, I think democracy and the education of people about their rights has much to do with it. Not too long ago in Kerala, Dalits were treated unbelievably poorly. For eg. Dalits were forbidden from letting their shadow fall on a person of a ‘higher-caste’, and Dalit women were forbidden from covering their breasts. I don’t think that happens in Kerala today and I think we should thank democracy and the communists for that.
He knew he’d been caught. He varied between being defensive, “IÃm not a racist” — most Sri Lankans have skin color darker than most Jordanians Its always comes down to the damn skin color. From clubs in Hong Kong to matrimonial ads in India its always about the color. I wonder when will white privilege end.
It*
Vurdlife: I disagree. Make living at home hard for them and then take away any chance of making money overseas harder? I don’t know why countries need to get involved at such a personal level. Protecting your citizens is one thing, but influencing what they do for a living is quite another.
Protecting your citizens is one thing, but influencing what they do for a living is quite another. In this case, Rahul, it’s the same thing. These people are trying, with the best of intentions, to work for a living abroad, but since they are treated as second-class citizens, virtually as slaves, isn’t it time the goverment protect them?
People in Sri Lanka have known about this for a long time. I left in 1989, and I remember even back then, the press reported stories of families receiving headless bodies. (I think the idea was that identification would be harder that way.)
The sad truth is that people are willing to try anything for a better life. A way to earn some money. And they cannot believe that sadistic treatment like this is meted out without cause. They convice themselves that those women did something to annoy their employers. And Sri Lankan culture is such that obedience and respect for authority is all, especially for women. And the sadder truth is that the goverment is too addicted to the income generated by workers sending money back to jeapordize its relationship with these Middle East countries.
The article got one thing wrong – ‘dukkha’ means sadness. But, yeah, there’s a hell of a lot of suffering as well. Shit, this is miserable.
Oh this isnt a new thing happening there. Indians and to a less degree Pakistanis (lesser probably because they are Muslim) are treated like total garbage in the Middle East. Ask any desi living in the Middle East how it is for them. Do you know they arent allowed in certain clubs and arent allowed to own property. Even in the Modern Dubai its hellish for them. I talked a Indian friend out of working in Dubai. Thank god he listened to me. The Minister for NRI affairs I read in India abroad wants to help these people who need the help much more than we Indians in the western world do.
Oh yea, there are plenty of newspaper classifieds requesting job applicants to be “ONLY US/UK/AUS citizens”…and they MEAN Caucasians. I wonder why being Caucasian is so highly regarded in the Middle East, many Caucasians think Arabs are fundamentalists and future bombers anyway, so why the preference for them while our people get treated so shabbily. I pray for all the Indians out in the Middle East..how sad really!!
there are a lot of complicated issues on top and under the simple issue of abuse and exploitation, and some SM commentors have offered smart complex analyses while some have been grotesquely asinine.
with that said, i have had a few conversations with saudis on this topic (in the USA). usually it was prompted by them, once they found out i was of bangladeshi origin, they would talk about how “clean” bangladeshis were compared to “dirty” filipinos/sri lankans/etc. i am pretty sure it had less to do with cleanliness than standard muslim prejudices against non-muslims. but in any case, i got the following impression:
religion matters. if you had to choose between being a dark-skinned sri lankan buddhist or hindu and a dark-skinned sri lankan muslim (or bangladeshi or mopilla from kerala), you would choose being a muslim, especially in saudi arabia. legal recourse and support is near nil for a lot of these women, but being a non-muslim drops the probabilities even further. i strongly received the implication that filipino christian women were particularly notable targets for sexual molestation (one dude talked to me about forcing himself on filipino maids in a lurid fashion).
race is also an issue. color prejudice exists in the arab world, and slavery has until recently been associated with blackness (or south asianness).
history matters. slavery wasn’t abolished in saudi arabia until 1960! many of the older individuals who employ maidservants might remember the years of slavery and just transfer their habits from saudi slaves to foreign workers.
Razib, thanks for pointing out specific examples, giving the more “asinine” commentors more credibility. By the way, the South Asian man who was wrongly executed in Saudi Arabia was a Muslim, so this is more likely about race than religion.
Slavery abolished in 1960? Wow, the media needs to cut the politically correct bullshit and expose modern day Arab society for what it is.
Arab society for what it is
well, i would add that non-gulf/arabian arabs often object to be associated with the oil arabs. i have a good friend who is of palestinian arab origin, and that community has been treated rather shabbility by the oil arabs as well. egyptians, syrians and jordanians are also often treated badly by the oil arabs. now, granted that non-oil-arabs are often given higher status than non-arabs, but the 200 million arabs display a lot of diversity in mores and tendencies. it is important to note that colloquial arab dialects are nearly unintelligible (as opposed to the cairo arabic in the media or the classical arabic of the koran).
i think that south asians often dislike generalizations based on one group (ie; race relations in england between a white-brown conflict due to tensions between muslims and the white british, while sikhs and hindus are relatively assimilated), so we should be cautious about doing the same to others.
Do Arabs tend to be as discriminative on the basis of skin color as Indians? Is light skin color associated with high status and valued?
I’ve noticed on television that many of Iraq’s elite tend to be very light skinned and often look “white,” but the poorer people on the streets are quite dark and look more Arabic. Similar to how India’s affluent urban residents look quite different from poor laborers in the villages.