And he continued raping me over the coming months until November. In the fifth month, he raped and hit me with the gun on the head and I fainted. These are the words taken from the testimony of Celestine , a Kenyan woman, sharing her traumatic experience when she worked as a migrant domestic worker in Saudi Arabia.
The sexual abuse Celestine experienced from one of her employers is just one of many inhumane and criminal treatment migrant workers can face in Saudi Arabia, especially women.
Approximately one million women from Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka , and Kenya are working in Saudi Arabia, in many cases as domestic workers in private households. Testimony from migrant workers denounce the same kind of inhumane and ill-treatment, namely: exploitative labor conditions, unpaid salaries, denied benefits, intimidation , violence, and other sort of abuses.
These abuses are happening in such significant numbers mainly because migrant workers have almost no protection under the regime of the kafala system. Many testimonies from women have reported that their living conditions clearly lacked appropriate security and privacy for them, like doors that were locked only from the outside, doors without locks, doors with locks but no keys, and rooms without windows.
A lot of these women also report situations of forced confinement imposed by their employers. One can easily imagine the deep insecurity an individual put in such conditions can feel.
