Slave Next Door (5 page)

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Campaign, a Washington, D.C.–based NGO devoted exclusively to the

rescue and support of abused domestic workers, discovered in the 1990s

that she had, unknowingly, been living next door to a slave. “It is the

reason I do the work I do now,” she told us.

There’s a very good chance that many of us have stood in grocery

lines with an enslaved domestic and have simply taken her for a quiet,

somewhat self-absorbed and timid foreigner if we noticed her at all.

Perhaps we saw her sitting in the park, overseeing children obviously

not her own, and thought she was simply a nanny. Often there is no

more indication of involuntary servitude than a weeping woman sitting

on a front step.

This is not like the old days of legal slavery in America. Then, a house

slave was an expensive acquisition and, as such, a symbol of status and

wealth. She—or he—would appear in the census, on property tax

reports and inventories, and in wills. Far from being a secret, a house

slave was an accepted—and sometimes envied—aspect of daily life.

Nowadays, an enslaved domestic is cheaply acquired, cheaply main-

tained, and kept hidden. When she is allowed out of the house, it is

rarely alone, and with her owners’ certainty that she has nowhere else

to go. The chains of bondage are formed by the victim’s own inability to

see beyond her prison. And often she won’t even know she’s the victim

of a crime.

M O R E T H A N J U S T A H O U S E K E E P E R . . . A N D L E S S

For Ruth, the day starts like all the rest; the fact that it is Sunday makes

no difference.3 She wakes long before dawn and begins to clean the

large house, careful not to disturb the family sleeping upstairs. If she

wakes the man or his wife, they will beat her; they have done it before.

Later, she gives the five children their breakfast and prepares lunch and

dinner for the whole family. Between meals she works, and she contin-

ues to work well into the evening. At night she has to sleep with the

one-year-old twins, caring for them whenever they wake. Between the

twins and all the other jobs, her workday, except for catnaps, is essen-

tially twenty-four hours long. If the family ever goes out, she is still not

left in peace but is made to wait in the hallway of the apartment build-

ing until they return.

Ruth was a totally different person when she arrived in the suburbs of

Washington, D.C., from West Africa, at the age of fifty-two. She had been

promised a car and a house in return for serving as a housekeeper and

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nanny for the family of a man who worked for the World Bank. She

was thrilled with a chance to help her impoverished family. That’s

what she was promised. Instead, both husband and wife beat her reg-

ularly, paid her nothing, and ignored her pleas to return to West

Africa.

When neighbors heard Ruth screaming, they called the police. On

the scene, the police turned to her “employers” to translate Ruth’s

broken French. When Ruth tried to act out the beatings she was suffer-

ing, the husband told the police, “See, she’s showing you how she beats

herself. She’s crazy.” And Ruth was taken to a local mental institution,

where she was forcibly sedated, her arms and legs tied to the bedposts.

By the time an interpreter arrived, the drugs had left Ruth unable to

explain her situation, and the hospital staff called her employers and

asked them to come get her.

When she was returned to her employers, they threatened her, telling

her that if she tried anything again the police would come and take her

to the hospital permanently. They told her that the security guard that

patrolled the area was, in fact, there to watch her and make sure she

didn’t harm the children. Isolated, terrified, intimidated, Ruth believed

them and spent many more months in slavery. Finally neighbors, who

could still hear her cries when she was being beaten, helped her to

escape. She was too traumatized to take part in the prosecution of her

abusers, and she returned, penniless, to West Africa.

Ruth received no pay and never really knew anything of America

except the site of her abuse. For Ruth, shock and despair replaced any

sense of hope or self-esteem. The front door no longer represented

the possibility of flight; it merely let her know when the man and his

wife came and went. Ruth lacked the language skills to communicate

outside the house; furthermore, she was terrorized with stories, fed her

by the couple, of police and government brutality. If you go to the

authorities, she was told, they will beat you, imprison you, and deport

you. So Ruth remained a prisoner in the home. But unlike a convict, she

had no fixed release date; she would remain until she was discarded,

was rescued, or died. She was one of the thousands of enslaved “domes-

tics” in today’s America.

By now, it should be clear that domestic servitude is not simply about

“housekeeping.” Behind closed doors, it entails unrestrained physical,

psychological, and sexual abuse. Victims are at the constant whim and

call of their owners. Obviously, they didn’t enter service to be enslaved,

and it might not be why their owners first brought them here.

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“Employers” often assert best of intentions, but the reality is a spiraling

down to an enslaved girl and an abusive controller.

Most household slaves in America are teenage girls, but some are

grown women whose hope is to earn money to send home to their fam-

ilies. Lakshmi was no longer a naive young girl; at thirty-four, she was

the mother of five and wife to an ailing husband. She was her family’s

only breadwinner, but she couldn’t find a job in her native city of

Bangalore, India. So she traveled to Kuwait, where she found work as a

domestic. After a few months, she was offered an opportunity to come

to New York City and care for the new baby of a Kuwaiti diplomat. She

was promised $2,000 a month; what she got was slavery.

When Lakshmi arrived in New York, the diplomat took her passport.

She was worked fifteen hours a day, with no allowance for fatigue or ill-

ness, and was forced to oversee the man’s two children. The diplomat’s

wife beat her daily, and she was serially raped. She was fed poorly and

paid nothing. Locked in the apartment, denied any social contact, and

afraid to leave, Lakshmi was a slave for four long years.

One day, after being so severely beaten that she feared for her life,

Lakshmi decided to run. She was terrified, but she managed to find her

passport and escape the apartment. Alone and overwhelmed on the

streets of Manhattan, Lakshmi ran, frightened that at any moment she’d

be caught by the man or his wife. Through luck, she found a sympa-

thetic cab driver who spoke Hindi, and he drove her to a Hindu temple

in Queens. From there, Lakshmi was introduced to Andolan, a charita-

ble organization for the protection of South Asian women. They helped

her and reported her case to the authorities. Lakshmi had just joined an

exclusive club—the fewer than 1 percent of all trafficking victims who

manage to escape or be rescued.

In time, the federal government offered Lakshmi a visa if she would

testify against her keepers; despite her terror, Lakshmi agreed. In this,

she was also an exception to the rule: many victims choose not to testify.

Their traffickers make it perfectly clear what will happen to them—and

their families in their home country—should they speak out. These vic-

tims need help: medical, psychological, legal. Yet fearing for their own

safety, as well as that of their loved ones, victims will frequently choose

to disappear before the trial, forfeiting the offer of sanctuary made by a

government that often seems more concerned with convicting the traf-

ficker than protecting the victim.

Despite Lakshmi’s willingness to see her trafficker punished, the gov-

ernment declined to prosecute, citing the man’s diplomatic status. This

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is an ongoing problem, since many trafficking cases involve foreign

diplomats who, when caught, plead immunity or are simply whisked

away by their governments. In cases such as this, the victim is often the

one penalized.

Every year, foreign diplomats, as well as U.S. citizens and employ-

ees of such international agencies as the World Bank and the United

Nations, legally import thousands of domestics, who are assigned

work visas. Most are brought here from various parts of Africa and

India; many are enslaved. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)

doesn’t include household workers in its definition of “employees.”

This, in combination with an immigration policy that ties the domes-

tic to her employer via her visa, works in the slaveholder’s favor and

places in jeopardy any domestic who tries to escape. If he abuses her

and she attempts to flee, she leaves herself open to deportation—

unless she can prove abuse—since she has broken her contract, which

can void the provisions of her visa. Should the case become public, as

with Lakshmi, a foreign diplomat can simply claim immunity. In

Lakshmi’s case, the diplomat was transferred out of the country, and

the Kuwaiti government stated that there would be no investigation.

“I guess she just wanted to stay here in the States,” said a Kuwaiti

official. “You only see such cases in countries where they see a good

opportunity.”4

B U T W H Y N O T J U S T R U N AWAY ?

Lakshmi escaped; the vast majority of slaves do not. How can a person’s

spirit be so broken that she accepts slavery over the risk of a bid for free-

dom? Why wouldn’t she simply run away? As we read this, most of us

harbor the conceit that we would rather risk all to escape than submit

to such slavery. Certainly
we
would never put up with such treatment.

But the reality is more complicated. A number of reasons—some more

subtle than others—keep a slave from attempting escape, even in the

“land of the free.”

One of the main deterrents is fear, in its many forms. At the most

basic level, the victim is afraid of being beaten or killed by the keeper

should she attempt to flee. Most probably he has abused her in the past,

so physical punishment is more than just a threat. The slaveholder is

also effective at instilling in the victim a fear of the world outside his

door. Often, he does this by showing her videos and television programs

that feature an abundance of brutality and violence. By watching any

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one of hundreds of cop films and being told over and over that it repre-

sents a true picture of life on American streets, the victim develops a

terror of leaving the house, let alone running away.

The victim is also taught to fear the police and the courts. The police

are corrupt, she is told, just as they were back home. They will arrest you

and beat you, and the immigration authorities will deport you. Finally,

the slaveholder instills the fear of retribution against the victim’s family

in the country of origin: “If you run, I’ll have your daughter killed.”

Intimidation is powerful, but still other reasons keep a house slave

under control. A surprising number of victims stay because they feel

they are responsible for the repayment of their “debt.” In all instances,

this debt is inflated, sometimes purely fictitious, and it grows to amounts

that are limited only by the traffickers’ greed and imagination. Still,

irrational though it might seem, some victims see it as an obligation

they are bound to fulfill.

At times the victim stays because she develops a loyalty to her master.

One of the more insidious effects of this loyalty is that the victim comes

to feel that her enslavement is her own fault. This might grow out of her

misplaced guilt, which engenders the belief that she deserves to be pun-

ished. An offshoot of this is the shame many slaves feel. By assuming

responsibility for her state, the slave feels a deep sense of personal

remorse, especially if she has been sexually abused. This shame keeps

her from situations where she would have to share her condition with

others; she wouldn’t even tell her own parents. In this we see a parallel

to the experiences of other women who are sexually assaulted or are

victims of domestic violence. Rape victims often feel intense shame,

though they know rationally that they have done nothing wrong. Slaves

will also feel shame, even self-loathing, in a way that paralyzes them and

prevents escape.

Language and geographic isolation are factors as well. The victim

generally doesn’t speak English, nor does she have any sense of location.

One woman who was enslaved in Long Island, New York, later stated,