Asia Times: Dhaka child domestics' life of hell highlighted



	November 27, 1999	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Dhaka child domestics' life of hell highlighted
By Tabibul Islam

DHAKA - When Rehana, a child domestic in the Bangladesh capital, was beaten to death allegedly by her employer last June, there was uproar in the media and activist groups demanded ''exemplary punishment'' for the accused woman.

Newspapers published special reports highlighting the life of drudgery of the country's domestics, their daily ordeal, overwork, and hopes and aspirations.

The police arrested the dead girl's employer for homicide, and high police officials assured the public that no one was above the law. But that was only to appease the public. Rehana's employer has secured bail, and the case has not progressed.

In fact, most often such cases of torture, rape or killing of resident servants, many of them minors, are dropped because of lack of evidence and witnesses. The victims' families are extremely poor and unable to pursue the case against the accused.

Shoishob or ''Childhood'', an organization working with child domestics in Bangladesh, has just published a survey which estimates there are between 250,000 and 300,000 resident child servants in Dhaka. They are children of very poor families, who send them to work with middle-class families because it represents one less mouth to feed. Their earnings, if any, are between 50 and 400 takas ($1-8). For some, their payment is food and shelter.

Domestic labor is ubiquitous: middle- and upper-class Bangladeshis cannot do without house help to look after the younger children, to keep the house clean, to wash clothes, to chop vegetables and often to cook the meals. Yet there is no recognition of the labor that it involves. There are no contracts or assigned duties. No holidays nor protection from abuse, physical or sexual.

Employers prefer maids between 10 and 11 years, because they are considered to be beneath the age of sexual vulnerability. The older girls are more likely to be the target of sexual attack by male members of the family, and sometimes even their friends.

The majority of child house maids come from outside Dhaka. They are confined to the house, and go out only with their employers, carrying their children or loaded down with shopping. They are the first to wake up in the household, and the last to go to sleep after they have cleared away the evening meal, washed the vessels and set the house in order for the morning.

Shoishob covered 10,000 middle class households in Dhaka in its survey. In these households, nearly 8,000 resident servants were counted, of whom 2,500 are minors, more than 80 percent of them girls.

It asked female domestics why they continued to work in households even though they were physically and sexually abused. A lack of choice was the most common reply to the question. ''Most of these domestic workers were unwanted even in their own village homes where the parents could not provide them food, cloth and shelter,'' said Lopita Huq of Shoishob.

According to Helen Rahman of Shoishob, domestic labor needs to be included among hazardous work like child workers in lathe workshops, in plastics, chemical and repair shops. Child servants are the ''largest and most open, yet invisible, form of informal child labor,'' she said. She estimates there are as many maids as ''number of households in the country, with some exceptions in the very low income groups.''

A recent Unicef report estimated there are 6.3 million working children in Bangladesh.

According to the recently-formed Bangladesh Domestic Workers Association (BDWA), the first of its kind here, 15 cases of servants being tortured to death was brought to their attention in the months of July and August this year.

The association, which will pursue the legal rights of resident servants, said it also knows of seven young maids being forced into prostitution, and over 300 being trafficked out of the country during the same period.

Amirul Huq Amin, its co-ordinator, has asked the Hasina Wajed government to bring the services of domestic servants under the labor laws so that domestic labor could then negotiate fixed duty hours, wages matching their services, timely payment of wages, a period of leave, festival bonus and other benefits recognized under the laws.

Households are the biggest employer of girls and women from impoverished families. Dhaka's garment factories are another major employer, now employing some 70,000 women after being forced to put a stop to child labor.

Writes Jeremy Seabrook of Third World Network: ''In Dhaka, there are three options for young women. All involve clothes. They can make clothes ... in the garment factories; they can wash clothes, ... or they can take off their clothes, whether as sex workers to service strangers or as youthful brides. It is far from evident which is the least onerous.''

(Inter Press Service)