Ethiopian female domestic workers in the Middle East and Gulf States: an introduction

Abstract

In a video shot outside by an anonymous bystander very close to the Ethiopian Consulate in Beirut, Lebanon on February 2012, a 33-year-old Ethiopian female domestic worker was savagely beaten and violently dragged by Ali Mahfouz who is the brother of a labor recruiter into the back seat of a black BMW, while a chorus of men silently watched the unfolding event and no one came to help her or stop the beating and dragging. This videotaped incident was later aired by the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBIC) on 8 March 2012, and the video went viral. The same report records that, after the incident, police arrived at the scene and took Alem to a detention center ‘without arresting any of her tormentors’. Alem was transferred to Deir al Saleeb Psychiatric Hospital for medical care where she committed suicide by hanging herself using her bed sheets, early in the morning on March 14, 2012 (Beydoun Ali 2006; Human Rights Watch 2012). Five years later in a horrifying video of an Ethiopian domestic worker falling from what media reports indicated was the seventh floor of an apartment building in Dubai, Kuwait went viral instantly. The video appears to have been filmed by the worker’s employer inside the apartment with the domestic worker dangling outside the window. Rather than assist her from falling, the employer was videotaping the incident from inside while the panicked worker calls out for her to grab her. But within 12 seconds of the video recording starting, the dangling woman lost her grip and fell from the seventh floor. Considered a miracle by many in the Ethiopian domestic workers community in Dubai, the domestic worker only suffered a broken hand, bleeding nose and ear according to the Kuwait Times (2012). The authorities arrested the employer and charged her for failing to assist her worker. These two incidents separated by geography – in Lebanon and Dubai and time are part of a wide culture of systematic abuse perpetuated by families and individual employers who have hired Ethiopian female domestic workers in the Middle East and Gulf States in the last two decades. Numerous other cases documented by international media and local agencies as well as the Human Rights group have reported widespread violence, rape, beating, starvation, and slavery-like practices, excessive domestic work, debt bondage, sexual slavery, and servitude of Ethiopian female domestic workers in the region. In the last two decades, the migration (both legal and clandestine) of Ethiopian female domestic workers to globalizing cities of the Middle East and Gulf States particularly, to Dubai, Beirut, Riyadh, Aman, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Sana’a, and Cairo has increased dramatically because of the dynamics of globalization and neoliberal economic policies which ushered in increased free trade, deregulation,