by SAROJ PATHIRANA
There are numerous reports of abuse and torture of housemaids in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia in particular
I cannot see these women but I hear them fighting to reach the mobile phone that belongs to the inmate that I am on the phone with.
Thangavelu Sarojini, a young Tamil woman, says she was tortured by her employer.
“I still have wounds and scars in my hands, neck, legs. They beat me, pinched me and burnt me,” she says from the Olaya detention camp where hundreds of migrant women from south and southeast Asia are held.
Their crime, they say, was running away from employers to escape physical, sexual or psychological abuse. They are all now classified as illegal immigrants under Saudi law.
“I was not paid for one-and-a-half years, they tried to kill me, then I fled to the embassy,” Sarojini tells me.
Hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan women arrive in the Middle East every year and they are a major foreign revenue earner for the island. But many claim to be ill-treated, tortured, or not paid for the work.
In one notorious case in August 2010, 24 nails were removed from the body of LP Ariyawathie, a 49-year-old Sri Lankan domestic worker in Saudi. Saudi authorities have pledged to investigate her case but there has been no reported progress in the investigation.
‘Imprisoned and unpaid’
But it is not only physical abuse that forced these hapless women to flee their employers.
BBC for more
(Thanks to Harsh kapoor of SACW)