Peril of the Overseas Maids

Young Indonesian women at a training centre for domestic maids near Jakarta, Indonesia - The Star/Asia News Network

School of Vice   

Tuesday 4 December 2012

Young smiling faces of women drawn from poor impoverished parts of South East Asia are a poor indication of the peril that is the domestic service profession; an industry that in theory called into existence by a gap in labour shortages created by the supply and demand trends within the market economy. Domestic servants or "maids" may often be trained to become efficient at their formal duties and tasks as ascribed for them by their agents and in their job specifications but little else in the way of affording safeguard mechanisms and protection against the oft reported instances of physical and sexual abuse that pervade and plague the industry. 

The horrors and cruelties that accompany the life of a maid may sometime be treated by authorities concerned as exceptional occurrences rather than the norms, and that provided the same authorities continue to gain economically from her exploitation and employment, the same risks and cruelties are overlooked and downplayed, backed by references to hard evidence and statistics that show a generally normal beneficial picture of many a happy maid. In fact, the horrors and violence that produced the headlines are exceptional only in the manner in which they managed to be reported at all; there must have been - and still be - countless instances of the violence involving rape, physical torture, overwork and so forth that have gone - are going - under the radar. Why is this so? Partly, this has to do with the jargons and language of economics of the day itself as well as the underlying complicity and mutual satisfaction and consensus in force between national governments and states over the issue in question. 

Disguised as domestic workers or maids these otherwise extremely vulnerable [mostly] young women are victims of a highly organised criminal trade in human-trafficking: they are there to perform the role of both the domestic slave labourer and the odd duties of the "sex worker" , and whilst the attendant risks are doubled for them, the law and the language sanitise the cruelties and thus legitimise the experiences that abound in practice. Does it somehow soothe our civilised conscience, or a fellow being endowed with fitting professional dignity if a 'prostitute' instead of being known as a prostitute is described as a "sex worker" or a "maid", for that matter?