Maid abuse: part umpteen
Sunday, December 19, 2004Another horrific story about abused maids in Bahrain. When will it end?
From the GDN:
[+/-] show/hide full news article
Agent is held for beating up maid
By TARIQ KHONJI
MANAMA: A Sri Lankan manpower agent is in police custody after a runaway maid accused him of severely beating her.
The man is said to have a history of beating and raping maids he brings into the country.
Migrant Workers' Group member Marietta Dias said that the man was arrested on Wednesday after the maid, also a Sri Lankan, ran away from her Bahraini employer because he had threatened to send her back to the manpower agency.
The woman, who arrived in Bahrain on December 10, claims that she was unable to do her employer's work because she was still injured from the beating she received at the agent's hands.
Ms Dias said that the woman's lips were swollen and that she claims to have been punched and kicked in the face repeatedly.
The woman found her way to the group and was taken to the police where she filed a formal complaint.
The group tracked down another of the agency's former maids, also Sri Lankan, with the help of Bahrain-based Sri Lankan Consul PB Higgoda.
The woman, who was brought to the country in May, claims that the man took sadistic pleasure in beating women and raping them.
She alleges that he even stripped the maids naked, including Sri Lankans, Filipinas and Indonesians, and made them watch while he was raping the others.
She also says that he used to push the women's faces into drainage holes with his feet and keep them down until they began suffocating.
Bear in mind that the accused abuser is himself of Sri Lankan origin. This is not a problem of one race abusing another race; it is about one human being abusing another human being.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, December 19, 2004 at 12/19/2004 03:20:00 am. Permalink
12/19/2004 09:15:00 pm
You can be sure tho that once the dude who beat up on the lady gets back to Sri Lanka, he'll be a hunted man... its better if the authorities keep him in prison here in Bahrain than deport him cos once he steps foot on his own soil - he's as good as a dead man!
"PB Higgoda - Bahrain-based Sri Lankan Counsel who helped the MWG" Am not supposed to comment on this part of the article but i will so that everyone can know what's going on:
A couple of months, way before the Al-Khawajah affair, i was a student volunteer with for a couple of NGOs in Bahrain and one of them involved the MWG...... at the time back in September there was a case about a Sri Lankan (SL) domestic helper who worled for a Brit family. The story has it that this lady's (domestic helper) mother was seriously ill & dying in SL and a couple of months earlier her sponsors had applied to the SL Embassy thru PB Higgoda - since he had approached the sponsors saying he was a Bahrain representaive for the embassy folks in kuwait to get her passport back from the SL Embassy to Bahrain - in Kuwait.
Well guess what.... the sponsors discovered that PB Higgoda wasn't supposed to be representing the Sri Lankan Embassy anymore... he was using an out-dated certificate to pose as a SL embassy counsel Rep. - that resulted in the Domestic Helper's mom passing away without her daughter by her side... her daughter till today has no idea what's happened to her passport... the SL Embassy in Kuwait say that it's lost due to unauthorized handling by PB Higgoda... PB Higgoda blames the kuwait ppl... the ball of blame keeps rolling on.......
And... after all this I hope that the MWG know with whom they're dealing with.... so much for a PB Higgoda who's supposedly a Bahrain-Based SL Embassy counsel.....
With rall due respect to the story that Chanad just blogged about.... a SL agent abusing a SL domestic worker and the mention of PB Higgoda's name in the news article as well... doesn't surprise me at all if PB Higgoda was involved in the abuse of this lady......
Well in good time.... everything will start bobbing up to the surface.. and the Bahraini Labor Ministry will start uncovering horrific abuse cases at the hands of manpower agents & ass-kissing individuals......
Speaking of uncovering.... why doesn't the Bahrain Government refuse entry to all foreign deomestic helpers who haven't got an embassy here to represent them- for example the Indonesian Embassy! How many more Indonesian Domestic Helpers should suffer at the hands of abusers before an embassy be given the green light?
One of the good steps recently by the bahraini government is the setting up of a free telephone line by the Interior Ministry, manned by trained professionals to deal with abused workers (both local & foreign) > that i guess is a MWG iniative before they get their shelter for abused women up and running........