One dead as hiring office holds maids captive in flatHas this recruiting agency been closed down? Who owns this recruiting agency? Will their name be published? Will they be prosecuted? I think we all know the answers to these questions...
KUWAIT CITY : Attorney Dr Esmat Al-Kharbotli Wednesday filed 10 complaints with the Maidan Hawalli Police Station on behalf of 10 Indonesian housemaids who were ‘detained’ for eight months inside an apartment owned by the maids recruiting office. The maids were neither given work nor paid during this period.
In her complaints, attorney Kharbotli said the housemaids arrived in Kuwait in 2007. Some of them worked in Kuwaiti homes for some time and because they were not paid their salaries they escaped from their employers and took shelter in their country’s embassy.
This led to the closure of files for some time of some offices that recruited housemaids. To reopen their files, the offices dispatched some of their employees to receive the housemaids from the embassy on the pretext they wanted to complete paper work to send them to Indonesia.
However, it was revealed later that the housemaids were housed in an apartment and kept behind locked doors for eight months. During that period, one of them died and no one knows where her remains have been taken.
According to the housemaids who have been freed, they saw their colleague die but did not know how to help her. When she died, one of the housemaids went into hysteria due to shock. “She is still suffering from shock,” the housemaids told the Arab Times.
For those unaware of how the recruiting agencies operate... when you want to employ a housemaid, you go along to one of these agencies and specify your requirements - nationality, religion, age, experience, etc. You can either import your maid, in which case you go through a catalogue and pick one out to be imported, or you can take home one that is already in stock. The models in stock are usually returns from dissatisfied buyers, and are kept cooped up in an agencies stockroom/prison until they are released to go home with a new employer. They are taken on a trial basis from the Agency and can be returned to the Agency if the customer is not satisfied.
In some cases, as would appear in the article above, the housemaids in stock may have runaway from their employers to seek shelter in their Embassy. Sometimes they will be coerced by their Embassy to return to their former Agency and seek work again. The Agency may 'discipline' the housemaid for having runaway from their employer instead of bearing the suffering of mental or physical abuse, lack of pay, etc, and beatings by the Agency staff are not uncommon. (In fact, the training provided by Agencies to their new imports includes gems like "What happens if madam beats you... work harder!). Agencies don't want dissatisfied customers returning their used goods! No doubt there is some incentive for Embassies to push out some of the 2-300 runaways they are sheltering also.... particularly when VIP visitors are in town. Some may be happy to go back to the Agency for the chance that they might get a good employer next time around; others are not given a choice, and are effectively transferred from the relative shelter of the Embassy to the Agency prison, rather than the deportation process which also includes a spell in prison. Bear in mind here, that in most cases, we are talking about the victims of abuse, exploitation, etc. being imprisoned, not the perpetuators of crime and exploitation.
So that's an overview of the process, and gives a little context to the news article above.
