Bahrain Tribune – 25 December 2003
Faripah, 20, attempted suicide following abuse
A 20-year-old Indonesian housemaid is in critical condition at the BDF Hospital after a failed suicide attempt by sticking a knife into her stomach.
According to the Chairman of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), Nabeel Rajab, Faripah Binti Robadi has suffered repeated assault and violent beatings at the hands of her sponsor’s wife since she joined the household 15 months ago. The beatings escalated five months ago and before she tried to take her life, she had been badly beaten with a wooden stick in her legs, chest and head and even had an eye badly injured. The employer had also pulled out her hair.
Bahrain Tribune – 25 December 2003
Faripah, 20, attempted suicide following abuse
A 20-year-old Indonesian housemaid is in critical condition at the BDF Hospital after a failed suicide attempt by sticking a knife into her stomach.
According to the Chairman of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), Nabeel Rajab, Faripah Binti Robadi has suffered repeated assault and violent beatings at the hands of her sponsor’s wife since she joined the household 15 months ago. The beatings escalated five months ago and before she tried to take her life, she had been badly beaten with a wooden stick in her legs, chest and head and even had an eye badly injured. The employer had also pulled out her hair.
“The suicide attempt was a cry of help from this poor woman,” Rajab told the Tribune. “It was only when she tried to take her life in desperation that her employers rushed her to hospital. When the BCHR and the Migrant Workers Group (MWG) took charge of the case, I went to see her and was horrified to see that her head has been battered and she is so critically injured.”
Indonesian community volunteer Rosikin said that the MWG and the BCHR had been of invaluable help in trying to resolve the case.
“I met Faripah and she is understandably traumatised,” he said. “She wants to go back home but doctors have told us she is in critical condition, having sustained internal injuries due to the suicide attempt and the beatings. We shall monitor her case and recovery before we take action.”Coincidentally, Faripah’s case came to light when the Kuwait-based Indonesian Political Attache Dwi Wahyu Wibowo is in Bahrain, to help deal with the increasing spate of attacks and ill-treatment of Indonesian housemaids and in particular to speed up the processing of the case of the Indonesian child Fitri, 14, who was sent here to work as a housemaid and rescued by the MWG.
It was in response to Fitri’s story which was aired on Indonesian television by MWG Vice-Chairperson Salma Bala that Indonesian ambassadors from seven countries (including the GCC and Arab countries) have been summoned to Jakarta this week to discuss solutions to the problem of the protection of Indonesian housemaids in these countries.
“We are a small community of 200 professionals and family members but in contrast, there are about 7,000 Indonesian housemaids in Bahrain,” Rosikin said. “In recent months, the increasing number of cases of battered Indonesian housemaids has overwhelmed the resources of our community and we have relied on the BCHR and MWG to provide help to these women.
However, with more and more housemaids coming to work here from Indonesia, we fear that the problem will grow unless there is help at the government level from Jakarta and Manama.”
Fitri will be reunited with her parents next week since she is flying to Indonesia on Saturday. “The delay in sending Fitri back was so that she would receive all the wages due and for us to make arrangements for her to be received when she arrives in Indonesia so that she reaches her remote village home safely,” Salma Bala of MWG said. “This is the first time she has travelled outside her village and we want to ensure her parents know she is returning and that the Indonesian Director-General of Manpower and Transmigration will give us the assurances for her welfare,” she said.
According to the BCHR, the recent widely-reported case of the abuse of Indian housemaid Anita Verma has led to a spate of reports and complaints by neighbours and housemaids themselves on maltreatment.
The Indonesian Director-General of Manpower and Transmigration held a meeting with the MWG representatives Salma Bala and Marwa Yusuf, during a recent workshop in Jakarta where which they presented a paper. He said that Indonesia did impose an age limit of 25 years on women leaving to work as domestic workers abroad. However, he said manpower agencies recruited workers from remote villages and falsified documents, something that was difficult to track in every case.”
“The root cause of much of the abuse is the manpower agencies,” Salma said. “They manipulate and coerce and create false documents and often the migrant workers are unaware of their rights and of these manipulations since they are illiterate. In Bahrain the MWG is pressing for closer monitoring of domestic workers as they enter the country.
Cases like Fitri’s escape the official eye because when the maids arrive in groups, they are made to sit in one area and all their passports are taken by the agent’s representative and stamped, without the immigration official seeing the women. Once the case came to light the immigration officials in Bahrain moved swiftly to cut the red-tape and arranged to let the child fly back with minimum fuss.”
The MWG is lobbying to make it necessary for every householder who applies for a housemaid’s visa to have a monthly income of at least BD350. Otherwise, the MWG volunteers say, housemaids are paid sub-human salaries of BD35 and 45 a month and that too for back-breaking work and long hours.
“We are also lobbying for proper police procedures to be put in place by the Ministry of Interior so that complaints of abuse brought by housemaids are properly registered and investigated. At present, police usually refuse to take complaints and often call the employer/sponsor and send the housemaid back to the people she is complaining about.”
She said that the BCHR was seeking to open a register at the Salmaniya Medical Complex and other hospitals so that staff could record cases of abuse that were brought for treatment. “We have no data to go by at present and such a register will help us track cases of abuse, employers who consistently abuse employees despite the threat of blacklisting and ensure that the victims get a fair hearing,” Bala said.