Thousands of women travel to Kuwait every year to work. As well as keeping employers happy, this also creates a booming “second-hand” market where returned domestic workers can be resold to other families for up to two years. Photograph: Pete PattissonĮmployers are given a 100-day guarantee by agents, which allows them to return domestic workers they are not happy with and get a refund. I said, ‘Madam, why you do this to me?’ She told me that I’m a slave … I’m too slow, I’m not fast enough.”Īdama, 24, a domestic worker from Sierra Leone, shows the scars on her leg, which she claims were caused when her Kuwaiti employer deliberately spilled hot oil on her. “I was crying, she did not even look at me. Adama claims her employer paid her nothing for her work and deliberately spilled hot oil on her while she was cooking. She raises her skirt to reveal a deeply scarred leg. You can never leave the house … You are not allowed to use mobile phones. “If they said, ‘I want this person’, they took you to their house.”Īdama, 24, said that after being selected by a Kuwaiti family she was taken to their house and treated “like a slave”. “ took us to their offices and people would come to look at us,” said one woman who worked as a nurse in Sierra Leone.
Women from Sierra Leone formerly employed as domestic workers in private Kuwaiti households said they had been “sold like slaves” by recruitment agents to families in the Kuwaiti capital and then resold multiple times.Įach said that they had paid about £1,000 ($1,480) to recruitment agents in Sierra Leone on the promise of jobs as nurses in hospitals or in the hotel industry, only to find on arrival that they were to be offered to families as housemaids and expected to work for up to 22 hours a day. Yet while dozens of recruitment agencies are pulling out the stops to attract potential employers – including parading women in front of potential employers who can take them home on the spot – they are also being accused of selling women and duping them into a life of domestic servitude.
0 kommentar(er)
