First let me say that this is a really tough subject to discuss, because there are a lot of conflicting opinions revolving around it in the region. And I don’t blame certain people from having different opinions, as long as it’s not as racist as most of such opinions are. As you probably know, this issue means a lot to me, because I grew up seeing a lot of nasty things that actually left me traumatized for life. Maids being beaten, maids being laughed at, maids being abused on a daily basis and on a number of different scales. I do consider the other arguments when I talk about this. I do understand that maids, a lot of them in fact, make mistakes. But it’s certainly not most. And a lot of the time, when these mistakes happen (yes, I’m talking about things such as theft or even murder,) it is a reaction to the abuse they’ve been put through.

No, I’m not justifying it, so please don’t assume such thing. I think if a maid committed a crime it should be punished. But let’s not ignore the fact that if let’s say, an Arab or a Westerner committed that crime, they would be trialled and treated differently in courts and prisons. Because we were born and we currently live in a culture where racism against these migrant workers have become something not only accepted, but expected, to the point where you are supposed to conform otherwise you feel differently if you actually befriend some of these workers.

I made a podcast about this here, if you care to listen to it, and I briefly describe my utter disgust with this situation. Or no, I should call it a crisis, since that’s what it is. What baffles me the most is that we simply don’t really understand that if it wasn’t for these migrant workers, we will be … well, nothing, right? Who else do we expect to do our work for us? Who else is constructing? Who else is cleaning our toilets? Who else do we take our anger on when we’re feeling miserable? Who do we laugh at and ridicule? They are extremely hard working, and if anything we should only feel thankful towards them. Instead we abuse them, discriminate against them, imprison them, and to top it all off we make infamous jokes where the words “Sri Lankan” and “Indian” are synonymous with “stupid” and “valueless.”

I found this article which was posted more than a year ago, but it’s still very much applicable to what’s happening today. In fact the case hasn’t changed much, unless it got worse due to the larger influx of immigrants in the region. This is the secondary source that I’m quoting from that article -

More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids… In Saudi Arabia, the most common destination, they call Sri Lanka “the country of housemaids.”

15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution… Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka’s Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year…

Read more for a few mentions of horrific cases.

I am going to write about this often, I have decided, because I am disgusted with what most people refuse to see the reality of. People even insist on this being a non-existent issue. They say that if it happens, then this exists everywhere in the region, which may be true. But if it exists in MY country, then I, as a citizen, should do something about it. I, unlike many others, refuse to sit back and say, “well it’s happening everywhere, so it must be normal.” Dear readers, this is not normal. This is a gross human rights violation and it goes against every right each of us here have either fought for or support. It should go against everyone’s ethics. It’s a crime, what we’re doing. Even if many of us are not directly guilty of this, in my mind we always will be guilty in one sense or another. Mostly because we have grown to accept it. We are being silence about it, even indifferent and careless sometimes. That’s acceptance, and it doesn’t even come with guilt. We’re allowing a big crime to take place here on our lands, without thinking twice about the consequences.

I understand that these people commit crimes, just like we do. But they are humans, just like we are. We all make mistakes. Most of us regret them. It happens. It is hardly the majority of these migrant workers who are committing the horrid crimes that we occasionally hear about. I’m not ever going to deny that such crimes take place. However, there are thousands of domestic workers around the region - if the majority of them were criminal, the entire region would be in an even bigger crisis. But the majority are simply not criminals. They’re generally helpful people who are trying to make a living by being “slaves,” and if not slaves in the traditional definition of the term, then they’re victims of harsh and unfair labor. They come from highly populated countries where poverty is a major issue and were unfortunate enough to have to leave their families and lovers behind in order to come here and be mistreated the way we have mistreated them for over a decade now.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that not enough people are even realizing what’s happening. Like I said in my podcast, we often complain about others being racists against us when we never take a minute to realize what we’re doing to people who are more unfortunate than what we could ever imagine. These are people who had the guts to come to a completely different country, not knowing anything about the culture and language, and trying to make a living very far away from their homelands where their families and loved ones are. Many of them were having enough trouble as it is back home, with abusive husbands sometimes which has often been the case of Indonesians, extreme poverty to the point where they had to witness the deaths of their own children, or war. They’re not here because they want to. They would never do this by choice. This is an obligation. Something else lead them to this lifestyle; bigger and more heartbreaking factors. They weren’t just born into it.

Despite that, they still have the guts to keep on living, but what we put them through, that’s not really living is it? Many of the times it’s torture. For some the only way out is even suicide.

I won’t ignore the fact that a lot of these maids luck out. They get placed in homes where they are considered family. I have some friends who were practically raised by their maids and couldn’t really imagine living without them. That’s not what I’m talking about here - even though I’m not ignoring it, I’m just saying that the abusive cases are the ones that we must talk about. And these abusive cases, well, let’s just say that I’m beginning to be more and more exposed to them, which means that they’ve increased.

Within a couple of months I will put together a campaign in order to oppose this, and it will finally be a source for information for people who want to know what’s truly going on. It’s about time they have a voice, don’t you think? I have already been spending a lot of time trying to find the victims personally and try to get them to share the stories, if they’re ever willing to share, which most do for the sake of their own safety. It will be called, as suggested by Sam who is a reader of this site and a possible contributer in the future, “Mideast Migrants.”

In a way this campaign is also tied to the Sexual Terrorism campaign which we very recently started working on, since there are many maids, like mentioned in the article posted above are forced into prostitution thinking they were going to be employed as domestic workers. Despite the title of this post I’m talking about South Asian migrants in general as it’s not only the Sri Lankans who are experiencing this.

I’m ashamed that this goes on. I’m ashamed that I, like most people, was once guilty of this. I was too young to understand and know any better, and no one ever made it clear to me that these people were actually people. I thought they were 2nd class citizens who were unworthy of a smile and some kindness because I was raised in a culture that portrayed them as such.

I owe it to myself to do something about this, because if I don’t, then to me, I would only be someone who once contributed to this grave issue. By not doing anything about it, I would forever be guilty of accepting this. And I don’t think I can bare it that much longer. I think I have seen too much to lack any passion.