JAKARTA: Many domestic workers across the world endure conditions akin to slavery, from physical and psychological abuse to working for months without pay and being locked up, a rights group said on Wednesday.

Human Rights Watch called on governments to make sure domestic workers receive the same legal protections as other employees and to hold their bosses and labour agents accountable for abuse.

"Migrants and children especially risk abuse," said Nisha Vary, a senior researcher from the group, adding that governments need to "better regulate working conditions, detect violations and impose meaningful civil and criminal sanctions."

The New York-based group, which looked at domestic workers in and from a dozen nations from Asia, to Africa, to West Asia, said it carried out interviews with hundreds of victims, employees, labour agents and aid workers between 1999 and 2005. The findings were published in a report, "Swept Under the Rug: Abuses Against Domestic Workers Around the World."

Some said they worked up to 19 hours a day, endured rape and other forms of sexual abuse, were deprived of adequate nutrition, or were forced to forgo up to 10 months of their salaries putting them into debt before they started working.

"In the worst situations, women and girls are trapped... or have been trafficked into forced domestic work in conditions akin to slavery," said Human Rights Watch, acknowledging that the prevalence of abuse is hard to estimate in part because of a lack of reporting mechanisms. Types of physical abuse outlined in the 93-page report ranged from slaps to severe beatings to using shoes or belts, knocking heads against walls, or burning skins with irons. Other women said they were repeatedly threatened. "Twice I lost consciousness as a result of the beatings," Tit Hashanah, one of an estimated 200,000 Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia, was quoted as saying.

"The first time it was raining and there was leak in the house and I forgot to put a bowl out [to catch water]. She hit me with a mop. Then, when I washed the clothes and the colour ran."

Human Rights Watch noted that there are approximately 200 million migrants worldwide — roughly half of them women — and for many developing countries the "export" of labour is increasingly important for cutting unemployment rates and boosting economic growth via the money they send home.

The most popular destinations for migrants from Asia has shifted in recent decades from West Asia to countries in their own region that have seen booming economies, the report said.

But allegations of abuse — especially in Saudi Arabia — by foreign workers continue, with the Indonesian, Sri Lankan and Philippine embassies handling thousands of complaints every year. "It was like a bad dream," a migrant worker from the Philippines said of his experiences in Saudi Arabia, where the lives of migrant workers are further complicated by gender, religious, and racial discrimination.

The report looks at the country's criminal justice system through the eyes of families and friends of migrants, some of whom were allegedly arbitrary arrested and tortured, and sentenced to prison terms following faulty trials.

Some were executed, it said.

"We have no more tears, our tears have all dried up," a woman in a village in India was quoted as saying after her son was reportedly beheaded following a secret trial in Jeddah.

AP

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