Guest workers at the Golf: "For sale: 25 years old, masters all chores, child-friendly"

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A post on Instagram shows the passport photo of a girl or a woman, she looks very young. It says in Arabic: "Bangladeshi for sale, 25 years old, she masters all the chores and is child-friendly." Salary: 800 riyals a month. Reason for sale: We do not need them anymore. " 800 rials, that's not even 200 euros.

On Arab Instagram and Snapchata accounts are always such ads. Young women from Bangladesh, the Philippines, India, Nigeria, Kenya, Sri Lanka or Ethiopia are being touted there: "always ready to work", "80% understand Arabic", "very clean and quiet". For a woman, the "reason for submitting" is: "She wants a cell phone, and I do not tolerate anything like that."

Internet trafficking is an outgrowth of the guarantee system widely used in the Gulf States. Actually, this practice is also prohibited there; there too workers from abroad have rights on paper. But the unequal balance of power leads again and again to abuse of power.

Sexually abused and doused with hot oil

The guarantee system is usually based on an agreement between two governments or state-run agencies:

• They export and import workers, sometimes with false promises.
• In the host country, household helpers are then transferred through the agency; the guarantee goes to the employer.
• He now becomes the "sponsor" or "guarantor" of the domestic help and assumes full economic and legal responsibility for them.
• Your residence permit is tied directly to the employment contract; a subsequent resolution is usually difficult. Employees are thus largely at the mercy of their employer.

This week, another shocking case became public - but this time social media were the salvation: In a Facebook video, Sumi Akter, 25, from Tajikistan, wrote in tears that her Saudi Arabian employer sexually abused her, imprisoned her, and doused him with hot oil have. She is afraid for her life. The video went viral, in Bangladesh, non-governmental organizations put pressure on the government to bring Akter back. On Friday, the young woman finally returned to her homeland.

According to local media reports, she had come home "empty-handed"; her employer had reclaimed from her the agency fee of the equivalent of over 5300 euros, which he had paid "for her". Also this man apparently held the guest worker for his personal property.

Important foreign exchange providers for the countries of origin

For those affected their own governments in their homeland are often no real help. Because for them the guest workers are important foreign exchange providers.

In Bangladesh, for example, remittances were the second largest source of foreign exchange after the textile industry, at more than $ 15 billion a year. Last year, the country sent more than 730,000 guest workers all over the world, including nearly 14 percent women - more women than ever before.

48 dead guest workers - this year alone

How many of them were or are affected by abuse and abuses is unknown. An unrepresentative survey of the Bangladeshi non-governmental organization OKUP among returning guest workers revealed that almost all of them did not receive their salary or received it only infrequently.

Almost two-thirds returned ill and had been mistreated. According to the Bangladeshi NGO BRAC, the 48 bodies of Bangladeshi women sent abroad as migrant workers have already been returned this year.

This article is part of the project Global Society, for which our reporters report from four continents. The project is long-term and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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