Domestically cruel!

By Hasan Mansoor  
To support her bedridden father and younger brother, Bano, a young girl from a lower- middle class family, worked at a bungalow as a housemaid.    One day when she was busy in her work the house owner asked her to clean his room. The employer’s wife and other servants were out of the house. She considers that day the most horrifying in her life.    “When I entered the room, he asked me to compromise on my modesty and when I refused he tried to assault me,” she says.    Bano thinks herself  lucky to have narrowly escaped the worst. She did not turn up again for work there. This is not a solitary incident. There are more. In fact, a lot more.    It was for the sake of a mere Rs1,000 per month that 10-year-old Sonia silently endured beatings at the hands of her employers for over two years.    She did not cry whenever her employer gave her a beating, as that would provoke her into hitting her more,” according to the girl.    In a past incident, Saleem was a servant at a house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal. One day while serving tea to his master he broke cutlery by mistake.    “He beat me with a stick so severely that I was unable to return home,” says Saleem, who lives in a one-roomed flat along with his parents in Machchar Colony.    A neighbour saw him bleeding outside the apartment and had him shifted to a government hospital. “When my parents went my employer’s home, he pushed them out of his house and warned them not to report the incident to police,” Saleem says.    Both these incidents went unreported. Bano now works at a local vocational centre and Saleem is a “Chhota” (apprentice) at an automobile workshop in Saddar.    Another previous incident reported young housemaid, Asiya, was brought to Civil Hospital Karachi with fatal burns. She had allegedly been molested by son of her employers and was later set on fire.    These incidents are only tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of cases in which domestic workers were subjected to torment. This menace has now become a norm in our society. Thousands of women and children work as domestic employees and are victims of violence at workplaces.    Ironically, despite the fact that the domestic servants work more than other labourers and employees, the local labour laws are too weak to protect them.    “And there is no policy to safeguard the rights of these workers,” says a lawyer. He says due to lack of a proper regulatory system to protect the rights of domestic workers the incidents of violence against them are on the rise. “The government has made no protective legislation for domestic workers and thus the employers have been given a free hand to unleash a rein of terror against the hapless people,” says the lawyer. Hundreds of thousands of young maids in the country are suffering the worst kind of atrocities, including sexual assaults by their employers, but they do not muster enough courage to speak out, due to fear of social stigma, as well as the influence and clout of their employers. For safety of these vulnerable individuals, a law needs to be promulgated. “The current labour laws fail to define domestic workers,” says the lawyer.