by DAVID BOYLE and MOM KUNTHEAR
Sothea, an 18-year-old former domestic migrant worker whose name has been changed to protect her identity, holds her infant child at their home in Kampot province. PHOTO/Vireak Mai/Phnom Penh Post
Her story is sickening: The 18-year-old former maid says that after she found herself alone on the streets in Malaysia, having fled an abusive employer, she was kidnapped and repeatedly raped, finally giving birth to the rapist’s child while locked up in a detention centre.
Yet such grisly cases are no rarity, and more than a year after the Cambodian government banned the sending of domestic workers to Malaysia, they keep coming, in what rights groups say is an unabated trend.
Malaysia and Cambodia have been in negotiations to sign a Memorandum of Understanding to lift the ban, but while officials discuss the terms intended to protect Cambodian maids from endemic abuse, many remain stranded abroad and face serious risk of abuse.
Sothea, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, is so riddled with shock and trauma she can barely remember exactly what happened to her after she went to Malaysia in January 2010.
Clutching her then 5-month old baby earlier this year after her repatriation in February, Sothea told the Post of how, as an under-age migrant, she was left defenseless on the Malaysian streets after fleeing employers who beat her, locked her in a bathroom for two days and made her work with almost no rest.
“I fled from my boss’s house around 9pm, and I walked alone along a quiet road that I never knew the name of,” she said, adding that she never even knew her precise location in the country.
“At about midnight, a black man appeared from somewhere and abducted me and pushed me into his car and drove me to his home,” Sothea said.
For about a month, he kept her as his sex-slave, raping her over and over again until police finally raided his house in June, she said.
But instead of taking the traumatized victim to councillors or a shelter, Malaysian police treated Sothea with a callousness rights groups say is typical when authorities deal with migrant worker abuse victims, imprisoning her in a detention centre for two months.
Sothea has never received a cent in compensation and has no idea if any action has been taken against her alleged attacker.
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