Ethiopian female domestic workers in the Middle East and Gulf States: an introduction

In a video shot outside by an anonymous bystander very close to the Ethiopian Consulate in Beirut, Lebanon on February 2012, a 33-year-old Ethiopian female domestic worker was savagely beaten and violently dragged by Ali Mahfouz who is the brother of a labor recruiter into the back seat of a black BMW, while a chorus of men silently watched the unfolding event and no one came to help her or stop the beating and dragging.¹ This videotaped incident was later aired by the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBIC) on 8 March 2012, and the video went viral. The same report records that, after the incident, police arrived at the scene and took Alem to a detention center ‘without arresting any of her tormentors’. Alem was transferred to Deir al Saleeb Psychiatric Hospital for medical care where she committed suicide by hanging herself using her bed sheets, early in the morning on March 14, 2012 (Beydoun Ali 2006; Human Rights Watch 2012).

Five years later in a horrifying video of an Ethiopian domestic worker falling from what media reports indicated was the seventh floor of an apartment building in Dubai, Kuwait went viral instantly. The video appears to have been filmed by the worker’s employer inside the apartment with the domestic worker dangling outside the window. Rather than assist her from falling, the employer was videotaping the incident from inside while the panicked worker calls out for her to grab her. But within 12 seconds of the video recording starting, the dangling woman lost her grip and fell from the seventh floor. Considered a miracle by many in the Ethiopian domestic workers community in Dubai, the domestic worker only suffered a broken hand, bleeding nose and ear according to the Kuwait Times (2012). The authorities arrested the employer and charged her for failing to assist her worker. These two incidents separated by geography – in Lebanon and Dubai and time are part of a wide culture of systematic abuse perpetuated by families and individual employers who have hired Ethiopian female domestic workers in the Middle East and Gulf States in the last two decades. Numerous other cases documented by international media and local agencies as well as the Human Rights group have reported widespread violence, rape, beating, starvation, and slavery-like practices, excessive domestic work, debt bondage, sexual slavery, and servitude of Ethiopian female domestic workers in the region. In the last two decades, the migration (both legal and clandestine) of Ethiopian female domestic workers to globalizing cities of the Middle East and Gulf States particularly, to Dubai, Beirut, Riyadh, Aman, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Sana’a, and Cairo has increased dramatically because of the dynamics of globalization and neoliberal economic policies which ushered in increased free trade, deregulation, and privatization embedded in the specific patterns of globalized markets characterized by temporariness and the contingent, precarious, unstable, and violent nature of domestic work.² Pushed by poverty and destitution into the ‘Houses of Horror’,³ Ethiopian female domestic workers are oppressed, abused, and policed by their employers, recruiting agencies and by the government regulatory agencies which reinforce their vulnerable position.⁴

Despite these horrific conditions widely reported in the international media, the flow of young female Ethiopian domestic wokers to the region has not slowed. Indeed, according to figures provided by the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs between 2008/9 to 2012–13, three regions (Oromia, Amhara, Addis Ababa) alone contributed a total of 316,064 legal migrants to the Gulf alone. Of this figure 94 percent or 297,512 were female domestic workers. (Kefale and Zerihun 2015). The number of women migrating using clandestine routes is estimated to be double that figure. Top destination countries in the Middle East are Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Lebanon, and more recently Sudan which is usually used as transit country as well as South Africa.

The flow of young Ethiopian women as migrant workers throughout the Middle East and Gulf States is one of the largest female migrations in the county’s history. Every day, hundreds of Ethiopian women pass through airports, camped ports, terminals either as legal contract workers or as illegal migrants to distant destination seeking work and opportunities; the number has increased dramatically since 1990.⁵ The recent increase in the rise of Ethiopian female migration is linked to the increase in urban and rural poverty as well as the rapid reintegration of the country to the global economy through the adoption of structural adjustment programs. Globalization accelerates the flow of finance, goods, and information as well as the movement of people, including those engaged in transnational migration. Since the early 1990s, contract migration has increased steadily to meet the rising demand for domestic workers throughout the Middles East and Gulf States. Remittances from Ethiopians living abroad in general also have increased significantly, both to the government and the families of individual workers.⁶ Following the overthrow of the military government in 1990, the pace of Ethiopian contracts and clandestine migrants to Middle East, Gulf States, and other regions of the world has increased dramatically. As the Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN) (2011) noted succinctly,

Ethiopians are on the move. Not only are more and more rural people relocating to towns and cities, but the number of Ethiopians leaving the country has also ballooned in the last few years. Many are trying to reach Saudi Arabia through Yemen, while thousands of others head for South Africa, Israel and Europe, crossing deserts and seas and placing their lives in the hands of smugglers who often have little regard for the well-being.

The genesis of this pattern of international migration of Ethiopians in general and female domestic workers in particular is related to a number of factors operating in Ethiopia, particularly since the early 1990s. The particularities of the situation in Ethiopia are exacerbated by armed conflict, recurrent famine, political conflict, urban and rural poverty, and environmental degradation have made migration a salient issue both for individuals or families whose life circumstances have been altered by the rapid socioeconomic, physical, and political changes as well as official government policy (Mberu 2006). The number of Ethiopians involved in both legal and clandestine migration has been growing steadily over the past two decades. The exact number of Ethiopian female migration to the Middle East and Gulf States remains sketchy. A report from the Ethiopian Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (2010) indicates that the agency issued 21,256 employment contracts licensed PEAs (private employment agencies) for Ethiopians to work in the Middle East from July 2008 to July 2009. Eighty-two percent of these work permits were for females to work in Saudi Arabia (61.9 percent), Kuwait (33.16 percent), and Bahrain (3.22 percent). However, Ethiopian government requires agencies involved in migration to secure official licenses the majority of individuals who migrate to the Middle East, Gulf States, Northern and Southern Africa involve working with smugglers who are unlicensed and traveling in dangerous clandestine routes. Reports from the field by NGO’s, local and international media outlets have documented the horrors of clandestine migration to the Middle East, Gulf States, Northern and Southern Africa.⁷ From the Mediterranean Sea to the Bab el-Mandel crossing the Red Sea to the barren desert and war-torn transit point in Yemen, Ethiopian migrants face an array of personal and institutional challenges because of their subordinate position in the labor market. Deemed as easily disposable, personal violence, rape, and abuse by smugglers and border police in transit are a recurring feature of clandestine migration and one of the central features of contemporary transnational Ethiopian migration. Indeed, many studies have shown that many Ethiopian women working in domestic service in the Middle East and Gulf States endure severe abuse, including physical and sexual assault, denial of salary, sleep deprivation, passport confiscation, and confinement sanctioned by the Kafala regime.⁸

Sexual abuse is an issue that is hard to quantify. But it is a widespread phenomenon. Some returnees speak of gruesome sexual abuses inflicted by their male employers, children, and relatives. Other cases include experiences of women who were employed as household workers but soon found their employers running clandestine brothels, subjecting them to prostitution, which is legally banned in most Middle Eastern countries and Gulf States.

One of the least acknowledged persistent problems for Ethiopian and indeed African migrant workers in the Middle East and Gulf States is the pervasive racism and xenophobia which manifest themselves in popular discourse, media treatment of migrant issues, and the prevailing institutional and individual discriminatory attitudes that reproduce racist beliefs about the ‘inferiority’ of Africans (Jureidini 2003). Hence, the widespread mistreatment of domestic workers by their employers and recruiters is rationalized and the female domestic workers are othered and mistreated, often with impunity (Ketema, 2014).

This special issue of African and Black Diaspora explores the unprecedented migration of Ethiopian female domestic workers to the Middle East and Gulf States, the contemporary barriers they face as they navigate a social and material world not of their own making. Yet, despite the enormous and persistent problems and challenges they face, migration from their country of birth has opened new possibilities for them as individuals as well as their families, and their stories also reflect on how they exercise agency and resistance.⁹

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AqY1tjGIlk. The video of LBCI reporting on the issue and interview with Ali Mahfouz can be accessed through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PypSPWyfvYY

2. The surge of migrant workers into the Middle East and Gulf States began in the early 1970s, when increased petroleum production brought with it a demand for skilled and unskilled labor. As living standards rose for nationals, opportunities in the service sector for female labor greatly expanded.

3. As Fasika Sorssa, a former Ethiopian domestic worker in Lebanon noted,

I worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, without any rest. I worked like a slave and was treated like one. They beat me regularly. The son of Madame tried to rape me several times. They always kept me locked inside the flat on the 13th floor. I couldn’t go out for three years. (https://www.antislavery.org/no-lipstick-lebanon/. Accessed September 2, 2017)

According to the Anti-Slavery International,

Since January 2007, 95 migrant domestic workers have died in the Lebanon. Forty were classed as suicide and 24 fell to their deaths during bids to escape from the balconies or windows of their employer’s flats. Over two-thirds (64) were Ethiopian, 14 were from the Philippines and 9 were Sri Lankan. The rest came from Bangladesh, Eritrea, Madagascar and Nepal. (https://www.antislavery.org/migrant-domestic-workers-dying-every-week-lebanon/. Accessed November 1, 2017)

4. It was a common practice among Ethiopian female domestic workers (non-Muslim) migrants to the Middle East and Gulf States, to acquire a ‘Muslim identity’, that is, women regularly changing their names for ‘Muslim names’ and as well as their dressing style. Some women still opt to acquire a ‘Muslim identity’ because some employers and recruiting agencies prefer to hire Muslims.

5. According to the US Department of State,

Ethiopian women are trafficked transnational for domestic servitude primarily to Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E., but also to Bahrain, Djibouti, Kuwait, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Some of these women are trafficked into the sex trade after arriving at their destinations, while others have been trafficked onward from Lebanon to Turkey, Italy, and Greece. Small numbers of men are trafficked to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States for low-skilled forced labor. (US Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2008. http://www.gvnet.com/humantrafficking/index.html. Accessed June 18, 2017)

6. Young Ethiopian female domestic workers are scattered throughout the Middle East and Gulf States, particularly in Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. A small percentage of women are also trafficked for sexual exploitation to Europe via Lebanon.

7. The heinous mass murder of innocent Ethiopian migrants in Libya by the Islamic State (IS) was videotaped for public consumption. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/world/middleeast/isis-video-purports-to-show-killing-of-ethiopian-christians.html Accessed November 1, 2017.

8. Kafala regime

 … in its current form  … creates a severe power imbalance between employers and workers and becomes detrimental to rights of migrant workers as a direct result of the policies that states justify by way of the kafala system. The kafala system causes, facilitates and perpetuates human rights abuses of male and female migrant workers … 

and serves as a mechanism to maintain servitude. Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants. 2014, The Kafala: Research on the Impact and Relation of the Sponsorship System to Migrant Labor Bondage in GCC Countries, Hong Kong.

9. There is very little research on the impact of physical violence, trauma, and dehumanization perpetrated by the employers on Ethiopian female domestic workers in the Middle East and Gulf States. Most of these female workers have reported suffering from more than one type of violence during the course of their employment, and many are so traumatized by the experience that it even negatively affects their ability to reintegrate into society upon returning home.