Hana Shams Ahmed
Published by the Star Weekend Magazine on 9 October 2009.
When Samia arrived at the lawyer’s office with her friend she was hoping to get advice on how to file for a divorce. The lawyer asked her some obvious questions about what was wrong with the relationship and whether she had children etc. When she told the lawyer that her husband had molested two teenage maids in the house, Samia expected the lawyer to be in full solidarity with her decision. The lawyer did not display much emotion, what she said in response shocked Samia instead. “This is quite normal for men of our country,” she said. Instead of pointing out to Samia that her husband had committed a punishable crime which she was an eye-witness to, the lawyer was showing her commiseration and in a meandering way saying that this was not serious enough for the dissolution of a marriage.
In another incident in a corporate office, a woman — involved in among other things, human rights activism — was complaining to her colleagues about how shoitan (evil) her young maid was. When asked what were among her greatest ‘sins’, she replied that the maid lapsed from her work regularly when she went out of the house and watched TV and received phone calls from her boyfriend!
The attitude and choice of words of the female lawyer and ‘human right defender’ points to how deeply embedded this acceptance of abuse of the underprivileged is. The discrimination and complete disregard of a domestic worker’s right to live like a human being has been discussed in the media in small columns, but has had little effect on societal outlook. The middle-aged approach of treating domestic workers as a human punching bag (sometimes literally) of everyone’s anger and frustration stays on, and is still the most exposed, yet invisible, form of human rights violation.