Widespread Beatings of Maids Shock Malaysia
International Herald Tribune
February 18, 2000
Thomas Fuller

Barely a day has gone by this month without a newspaper here publishing a photograph of a housewife in handcuffs or a housekeeper with a swollen and bloodied face.

A spate of severe beatings of maids has shocked Malaysians into wondering what causes people described by their neighbors as "kind and soft-spoken" to turn against their maids with such violence.

"What sort of monster cages their domestics and denies them even the right to go to the toilet?" asked Marina Mahathir, daughter of the country's prime minister, referring to a recent case. "I shudder to think what this actually says about our society."

The furor over the beatings began this month with the case of Nurjanah Maytak, an Indonesian woman in her 40s who was allegedly beaten by her employer before the police intervened.

The employer had slapped and punched her and sometimes poked a stick into her gums, Mrs. Nurjanah said. For each "mistake" she made, she was forced to beat herself on the thighs with a cane 50 times, she said.

Following Mrs. Nurjanah's high-profile case, stories emerged from around the country about maid abuse. One woman was kept in a cage. Another was beaten with a heavy object until her skull fractured.

The publicity galvanized some maids into leaving abusive employers. One maid from Johor Baru in the south fled her employer after she had been raped five times, she told the authorities.

The beatings have highlighted the plight of the hundreds of thousands of domestic workers in Malaysia and of the country's overall foreign worker dilemma.

For years, richer countries in Southeast Asia have reaped the benefits of developing faster than their neighbors. Countries like Malaysia were able to import cheap labor from more sluggish economies, hiring workers to do the menial tasks that Malaysians no longer wanted to do.

Bangladeshi workers came to Malaysia as gasoline station attendants and restaurant workers. Indonesians paved roads and helped erect the world's tallest towers, in Kuala Lumpur. Maids came from Indonesia and the Philippines.

"We are a nation that cannot even construct a building with our own hands anymore," Sheryll Stothard, a Malaysian writer and social critic, wrote during the height of the boom years. "We have become a nation of subcontractors depending almost totally on foreign labor, money and expertise."

Now Malaysia is discovering the social costs of imported labor. Foreign workers are blamed for burglaries and violent crime. Their hastily built shanty towns, usually erected near construction sites, are routinely razed by the police.

Malaysia is estimated to have between 1 million and 2 million foreign workers, but the actual number is unknown.

"This is one area where there is no transparency at all," said Mohamed Ariff, executive director of the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research. "Nobody seems to have the data of how many workers are here and how many of them are really legal. There's a lot of foreign illegal workers everywhere."

After the economic crisis struck in 1997, the government sought to reduce the number of illegal workers coming to Malaysia from poorer neighboring countries. The police began turned away what Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad described at the time as a new breed of boat people.

But reducing the number of foreign workers in the country proved unpopular with businesses that rely on cheap labor for their factories — and middle-class families who say they have come to rely on domestic help.

"Having a foreign maid can no longer be regarded as a status symbol," Malaysia's best-selling English language daily, The Star, said in a recent editorial. "Even those earning average salaries cannot do without foreign maids."

While it is a measure of Malaysia's economic success that so many families here can afford a maid, it is also a measure of social failings, Malaysians say, that abuse is so widespread.

"Malaysian employers have shown their ugly side, time and time again, that domestic helpers are no more than slave labor," said Elizabeth Wong, the coordinator of a Malaysian human rights group, Suaram.

The Malaysian government on Wednesday ordered a study into ways of protecting foreign maids, with one minister saying he was concerned that the country's image was in jeopardy.

Maid abuse is nothing new, human rights workers say. Many agencies withhold the maids' passports while they are working in Malaysia, and it is not unusual for maids to be denied days off.

Ivy Josiah, executive secretary of the Women's Aid Organization, a nonprofit shelter for battered women, said her organization would propose that Malaysia look to Singapore for a model contract. That contract specifies that maids be given eight hours of continuous sleep each night, adequate rest periods during the day and pay for work on their day off.

"We've had equally horrific cases every year for the past five years," she said of the new revelations. "It's only now that it's become a major issue. We finally have the attention of the government."

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune