More sad news from the Middle East

KUWAIT—The Kuwait’s leading daily broadsheet, The Arab Times, in one day issue alone (15 Aug) last week, reported on three acts of employers’ cruelty against their domestic helpers. A Nepali housemaid died after her female employer hit her head with a bathroom tile. In another news item, it was reported in the same page (six) of the same daily, that a Shri Lankan maid sustained injuries and fractures after a failed attempt to commit suicide due to alleged cruelty inflicted on her by her employer. Still on the same page, the newspaper reported that an Agency manager accused an employer of raping two Eritrean maids.

This is becoming a dirty habit already. The pattern is clear and indubitable. Even if the victims are not OFWs, there are many similar cases involving Filipinos.

Here in Kuwait alone, in the Center that I run, there is one maid from the Visayan province, who is now sick after undergoing weeks of forced prostitution. She run away from her employer due to alleged multiple physical and verbal abuses. The taxi driver she asked to bring her to the Embassy instead sold her to a prostitution ring. She then suffered the harrowing experience of being abused by more than a hundred beastly men daily until she escaped.

Now she is under the custody of our Embassy and we are attending to her healing process - physical, emotional and psychological. We are pursuing cases against the syndicate that inflicted on her such shocking travesty of human dignity. I know that this is dangerous territory. The social welfare attaché in KL was reportedly murdered by a syndicate of traffickers. But we are not going to be intimidated.

Protecting OFWs fully

We cannot, for God’s sake, close our eyes to the scandalizing realities before our eyes. These matters should be reported to the ILO (International Labor Organization) and to the IOM (International Organization Migration) and all human rights advocacy institutions, so that a viable and forceful global approach can be formulated to address the problem.

Our law-makers and policy-formulators should take these facts into consideration and the strategic issue should be resolved: Should we continue to send domestic helpers to these countries?

While our government is mandated to promote full employment to Filipinos, it is also obliged under the Constitution to assure full protection to labor, and we hasten to say, more so to overseas labor because our OFWs are working in alien cultures and in foreign environment, away from their comfort zones and deprived of their security blanket.

They have to be protected from the deceptions of illegal recruiters and from the schemes and traps of beastly traffickers. They should be protected from cruel, inhuman and dishonest employers. Above all, they should be protected from themselves, from their own naïveté and recklessness, from their own imprudence and lack of foresight.

They should be stopped from going into countries that do not guarantee their basic rights, from those that can not protect their human dignity.

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