India Tackles Sex Trafficking With 'Maid
Ban'
AFP - Middle East
TimesMay 15, 2007
NEW DELHI --
India will ban women under 30 from emigrating to work as domestic
help in the Gulf and parts of Africa and Southeast Asia in a bid to curb sex
trafficking, a report said Tuesday.
The move came after Renuka
Chowdhury, the minister for women and children, said that overseas domestic
workers had complained of being pushed into prostitution after their employers
had seized their passports.
A ban will be "imposed on granting
emigration clearance to women below 30 if they are seeking employment as
housemaids," Chowdhury, who recently returned from Kuwait, was quoted by the Times of India
as telling parliament.
An exception will be made for women who
return to India on leave from their jobs and who wish to return to their
employers, the ministry for Indians working abroad said.
Some 17
countries will be covered by the ban, which was aimed at halting the trafficking
of women for prostitution, the newspaper reported.
Chowdhury said that
she was considering a move to require overseas domestic workers to deposit their
passports with the local Indian embassy or consulate, aping a model used by
Singapore for its citizens, according to the report.
Millions of Indians
work overseas, particularly in the six oil-rich Gulf Arab countries of Bahrain,
Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
As many as 6
million Indian expatriates send home $20 billion a year from Gulf states.
But reports abound that the migrants are mistreated, according to
workers' associations and human rights groups.
"Reports of
foreign women working in domestic positions being beaten or sexually abused by
their employers and recruiting agents were common [in 2006]," said a US State Department report on Bahrain, where
130,000 Indians work.
In one case in 2003, a 28-year-old Indian domestic
worker was hospitalized after being abused by her employer for three months, and
received less than one month's pay over the period, the report said.
The
situation was equally grim for South Asian maids in the United Arab Emirates,
where close to 1 million Indians work, the State Department said.
A
Bangladeshi woman who went to work in the country as a domestic servant was
thrown from a fourth-floor balcony last year by her five Bangladeshi traffickers
when she refused to work as a prostitute.