Ramita Navai

Indonesian women working as maids in Malaysia are routinely abused, deprived of their passports and made to work for negligible money. One woman was burned with an iron, then forced to scrape her burnt skin from its surface; another worked 18 hours a day for 10 months, unpaid and enduring beatings with a golf club. The Indonesian government is demanding rights for the women (minimum wage, a day off, the right to keep their passports). But the tragedy’s context is the poverty at home that these migrant workers are trying to escape.