"Maid in Lebanon" är en dokumentärfilm som berättar om de outhärdliga villkor som många fattiga och utsatta gästarbetare, särskilt kvinnor, tvingas utstå. Filmen som är producerad av Forward Films och finansierad av Caritas Libanon, Caritas Sverige, Internationella LO, Nederländernas ambassad i Beirut och FN:s flyktingkommissariat är framtagen för att visa ett problem som oftast möts med tystnad i de berörda länderna. Bara i Libanon finns omkring 200 000 migranter,oftast kvinnor, som arbetar i hushåll. Många har svårt att få ersättning för sitt arbete och måste arbeta både dag och natt utan reglerade ledigheter. Alltför många råkar också ut för våld och misshandel. Caritas Sverige arbetar genom lokala partnerorganisationer för att stärka gästarbetarnas rättigheter bland annat genom att medvetandegöra myndigheterna och det lokala samhället på problemen.

Läs gärna mer i detta pressmeddelande från Caritas Internationalis! 

Modern-day Slavery in Lebanon
 
Vatican City, 10 April 2006 – It seems the woman was only spared from being thrown off a high-rise balcony in Beirut because she pleaded for her two children left behind in Sri Lanka.

“I have two children, I want to see their faces again,” she pleaded.

She lived to tell about it, how she was handcuffed to a chair, then locked for hours in a bathroom, to finally be taken out, thrown on the floor and beaten by her employer with a metal pipe until the skin was coming off her legs and back.

He also cut off her hair, a Sri Lankan woman’s pride, as she begged him not to do it, and then rolled it up and stuffed it in her mouth.

Yet this is not a random act of violence, but a form of “domestic” violence that is brushed under the carpet like so much embarrassing dirt in the civilized society of today’s Lebanon. It is the plight of many maids in Beirut, where only because there is some degree of press freedom, occasionally their stories appear in the media. In other countries across the Middle East and the Gulf, there is only silence.

This unnamed victim’s account is just one of many in a documentary film called “Maid in Lebanon,” produced by Forward Films with funding from Caritas Lebanon, Caritas Sweden, the International Labour Organisation, the Embassy of the Netherlands in Beirut, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Especially since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, the country has seen a huge influx of immigrants, especially female domestic workers, drawn by the hope of making money in a more affluent country to send to their families back home. They typically come from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, pushed to emigrate because of the extreme poverty in their countries. Many send money back to pay for children’s school fees, or to build their families a home.

Makeshift agencies that are almost completely unregulated arrange for them to work in Lebanon. Upon their entry, however, their plight often begins when the state immigration authorities confiscate their passports and turn them over to the employer, who is responsible for the worker. At that point, the agency will typically disappear from the picture.

Many of these women are forced to work day and night, and the one day of holiday they are promised in their flimsy contracts never happens. For about $3000, one can buy a two- or three-year contract for a maid from an agency, during which time the employer is supposed to pay the employee’s salary of anywhere from $150 to $300 per month.

Sometimes the salaries are never paid. And the women are locked in houses, barred from the telephone, and in some cases, they are even denied food.

If they manage to run away, sometimes by surviving a jump from a balcony, they often find themselves charged with theft, a typical employer’s ploy to get the maid back.

Their embassies are beginning to pay attention to their plights, however. The family members of one Philippine maid who died in Lebanon in February, for example, are urging their local authorities to re-investigate her death.

According to a report in the Philippine Enquirer, Haidee de la Calzada’s father asserts that it is impossible she committed suicide, as the Lebanese authorities found, since she has no fractures after a fall from an eighth-floor balcony. But her body was covered in bruises inflicted by someone, he said.

The family also received panicked mobile phone messages from her right before her death, suggesting she was being sexually propositioned by the man of the house.

According to the United Nations, there are as many as 200,000 domestic migrant workers in Lebanon, which has a total population of 4 million people.

During his November visit to Lebanon, Sigma Huda, Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights on trafficking in persons, said that human trafficking, especially in women, remains a huge but unacknowledged problem in Lebanon.

“A significant number of human beings, women in the majority, are trafficked into and within Lebanon,” he said.

“Unfortunately, their plight seems to remain unknown to significant parts of Lebanese society, perhaps because the victims tend to be foreign nationals or are considered to be of low social status. Lebanon's victims of trafficking are often invisible victims because they suffer in places that remain hidden to the public eye such as private homes or hotel rooms,” Huda added.

Another frightening aspect of this tragedy emerges in the documentary film, “Maid in Lebanon.” After being sexually harassed by the son of one employer, one victim managed to escape and return to Sri Lanka, probably more indebted than when she left.

But she is already planning to go back, pushed by economic desperation. This time, she’ll have to hope luck will find her a decent “madam,” but it’s luck of the draw.

More than one million Sri Lankans work overseas. Some 600,000 of them work as domestic servants.

Caritas Internationalis is a confederation of 162 Catholic relief, development, and social service organisations present in over 200 countries and territories.

For more information, contact: 

Nancy McNally, media officer

Tel: +39 06 69879752

media.officer@caritas.va

www.caritas.org