Monday, June 02, 2008

Another Maid Abused!

The solution, as I see it, to end the abuse of maids and household help, is to eliminate it! No more maids.

This poor, young woman, Ameena Ayas, was found "gagged and blindfolded," after being dumped in a vacant lot by her employer. "The Prosecution and Investigation Board in Makkah is investigating a Saudi woman who tortured her Indonesian maid and then abandoned her in an empty area in the outskirts of the holy city." And, let me guess... The investigation is going to show that there isn't enough evidence to prosecute the Saudi woman who tortured her, right? Because cuts on her head, bruises on her neck, face and back, burns on her upper arms and forearms, lash marks on her chest and some slight fractures will all be signs of some pre-existing condition that Ms. Ayas had before she came here.

Sickening. Just sickening. And absolutely nothing will be done about this cycle of domestics being horrifically abused [or killed] by their "employers." Nothing. Oh, sure, the Labor Ministry here "warns" the abusers that they will receive a jail term, but you don't [and won't] read about them in the newspapers [because it will never happen].

W
hy do all of these households require full-time maids, anyway? I can understand wanting some part-time household help - someone to clean the bathrooms, clean the floors and do the windows. But full-time, live-in help? Honestly, you don't need it. What are these women all so busy doing that they have to have slaves maids? They don't work; only a very, very small percentage of women here have full-time jobs. They can't drive; so it's not like they are busy running children to schools, doctor's appointments, dance or music lessons [as if!], after-school sports activities, or doing afternoon carpools! So, then, someone explain to me why all of these women require full-time maids and why they can't be doing some of the housework and child-rearing?!? [They shop. That is, literally, all that there is to do here if you don't live on a big "organized" community-type compound. And, even shopping can't be done as a full-time occupation; everything closes from 11:30 in the morning until 3 or 4 in the afternoon for prayer!]

No doubt, part of the reason one believes she needs a full-time maid is to "keep up with the Jones' next door." She has a maid, I must have one, too. It's not a secret that even households, here, that have minimal income coming in seem to believe they must have a maid. The Labor Ministry, supposedly, requires a minimum income along with dictating the number of wives and children that families must consist of, before allowing the household to "sponsor" domestic help. "Wasta" allows many to get around this, no doubt. The point being, however, that the minimum income that one "supposedly" has to have is 3500SR monthly [$938.33 U.S.] to recruit household help and the monthly going wage for that is about 500SR [$134.04 U.S.]. These employers are going to give up "a seventh" of their monthly income to pay for household help? Yeah. Right. Not without believing that this entitles them to treat the maids like slaves they won't. Oh. Wait. You don't pay slaves!

Whatever. Nothing is going to change this situation as long as these people are allowed to recruit and import domestic help without truly putting a law into place and showing the rest of us that you mean business when you say you are going to jail abusers. It hasn't happened yet. And it's not going to happen anytime soon. Until this situation changes, and changes dramatically, we are still going to read - and read, often - about slaves maids being abused on a regular basis.

7 comments:

  1. Obviously you havent had an indonesian maid the way my wife had growing up in indonesia (she is indonesian herself).

    unlike the image of a maid you have in your head, the british western version, eastern versions are a bit differently.

    my wife tells all kinds of stories of her deceased mother having to search the maids to insure they didnt steal things from the house.

    how a large proportion of help was also of the criminal groups. so they would work scams too.

    the reason your getting all this is that the indonesian maids have discovered that in the west, the oppressed get a free ticket.

    everyone will assume that the maid was a victim, and she will get citizenship, and money for such. there is even a neat medical practice that causes bruising that is common to indonesia (two different ways to do it, one using a vaccume and a glass like hundreds of years ago, and another scraping the flesh with a coin that causes bruises that look like you were hit with a stick, but its done for illness, like bloodletting was).

    in such cases its really hard to find out the truth... sleeping on the floor for maids is common in the east, but not the west where maids and help are given rooms.


    i will also point out that if you do away with maids as a business, you will do away with a lot of business where a lot of (The majority) of women make good money and do really good work.

    maybe your right... stop the maids, and stop them from getting citizenship in 5 years for being sponsored.

    things aer not what you think they are imaginging others are like you.

    next month i will be going to indonesia, and we will have help helping us.

    a median wage there is US900 a year... many live on less than 1 dollar a day..

    so the people we will hire (not because we need to), will do better because we are visiting to have our second wedding.

    the maids that come to the west send money back, and their families us that to start businesses and go to school.

    so in your effort to catch or prohibit a few, you will be sentencing the majority to more poverty.. (just like the problem with mexican illegals in the US. a few are real bad, most are hard workers).

    i grew up very poor... and i got a lot of help from people like you...

    i spent my childhood wishing such helpers would have gone off and helped their own families.

    their help was more for their own mental anguish at the fantasies they believed in (like you), than the actual truth.

    scammers do hurt themselves to prove their cases... ever watch the videos of people falling down stairs purposefully to get insurance? or crashing cars? breaking bones? etc.

    so its not that simple.. EVER...

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  2. Ya, know, Artfldgr, perhaps you'd have a point with this if I was in the West; I'm not. Trust me, the country these maids are coming to work for - there is no such thing as citizenship and $$$. And, the maids that come here have very little to send back to their families - IF they get paid, at all. Thanks for cluing me in on the "fantasy" I'm living here. I just had no idea...

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  3. ah... i didnt know you were talking dhimi law (indonesia is islamic too).

    i thought you were referring to the indian couple here in the US that had a perfume company.

    [and a few others cases]

    there are bad in all places...

    sorry for what i would say was lack of proper nuance on my part.

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  4. Not up on US news enough to know about the couple that had the perfume company [send me a link if you get the chance].

    Yes. I agree. There is "bad" everywhere.

    However, I have never in my entire life seen so many maids abused or mistreated as I have seen, here.

    No problem about "lack of proper nuance," Artfldgr.

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  5. thanks... i didnt realize that you were located in another place. another place another set of rules, so there are different conclusions.

    here is a link to stuff about it. i am not saying its a good link, its just a ratty thread i found that you can follow and find information. so dont trust it as a source, trust it as a starting point... it may be good, and detailed, but i didnt check it other than it will give you some link to the story.

    www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/004910.html

    while the reports are easier to believe in your country, in my country its not so clear cut.

    since the maids can get great reward for being victims, it makes it very difficult to then know who is a real victim. (this is something that the leftist rad fems didnt get when they decided to rely on ideology over fact).

    if you want to know where i stand on such cultural things, i stand in the same place the english did with sutti.

    they said that they would not interfere with teh customs of the locals, they can have their sutti. but that the british had their own customs too, and they will also be followed. so they can build their sutti pyres, while the british build their gallows. and when the people of india are done with their custom, the english will have theirs.

    i am not english, but i am old enough not to be secular enough that i can judge that treating people that way is appalling, if its true. (because pretending the thing becomes appalling the other way aroudn)

    thanks for the understanding. i should have read your about me first.

    [by the way, i live in a neighborhood with 800 cultures represented. we have abeyahs and burkas, and many others of this kind of thing. did you know that the italians had similar too? the issue is not as clear as the west makes it on either side of the argument. in a way i am sorry that the west messes it up this way for political games.)

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  6. oh just looked at the link. they are as aware of the saudis as i am.

    however one of the things that caught my attention in the case was that they made them eat hot peppers (then eat the vomit).

    most people in the west think chinese food is bland. even though they may order spicy sechuan.

    however, most are not aware that the foods in indonesia are VERY hot. i love hot food, which makes it easier for my wife and i since i am of european origins genetically. we are talking incredibly hot food of the kind that americans will not go near.

    she sits and eats the hottest pepers and i often like a nice helping of habanero sauce. we even have grown those black peppers from the mountain areas of bangladesh. they are nuclear.

    so to find out that one of the tortures was that native indonesians had to eat american peppers of which hotter than habaneros are illegal is fishy.

    there are other parts that are fishy too.

    the sad thing is that the cultural abuse that is common in AE countries, can be leveraged for advantage here.

    do i think that they were abused? i dont know. the whole thing is odd and weird in several ways and the photoes of injuries i saw look like the home remedy thing i mentioned.

    i will not deny that many people come to america and try to live as if they were back home, but this family was pretty well assimilated.

    i will guess that they fell into old customs as to sleeping quarters and other things, which then left them open to be taken advantage of.

    american courts are no longer innocent till proven guilty. especially where abuse of women is mentioned.

    the women in AE do not get gifts for being victims (as you mentioned), and so the reasons are much less ambigious, and so the situation is much less ambiguous. they get nothing out of it, and actually end up with less out of it (if that can be beleived), so they are forced to tolerate it.

    take care... and good luck!!!!!

    keep your head down, and be happy :)

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  7. Thanks for the link, Artfldgr. I went to it - and I guess I do remember reading about this at one point.

    Yeah. Keep my head down and be happy. I'll try!

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