Yet another young woman — Nodi, who was sent to the Gulf country last year as a domestic worker, but her passport falsely mentioned her age 25, the minimum age required for women to go to Saudi Arabia, has returned as a dead body. The documents sent along with the body claimed Nodi died by suicide in August but her family claimed that she was either killed or forced to commit suicide after brutal torture.
This tragic incident is not an isolated one. Between 2016 and September this year, 473 bodies of female migrants were sent from different countries. Of them, 175 came from the Saudi Arabia. Of the 175, 51 of them died by suicide. An analysis reveals that at least 81 female migrants working in different countries died by suicide in the last four years. Of them, three died in 2016, 12 in 2017, 23 in 2018, 29 in 2019 and 14 this year.
Nodi’s case is almost identical to the other horrific tales of abuse of female migrants by their employers in the Middle East. Most are abused so horrifically that they commit suicide. The actual number of female migrant workers returning home from KSA is hard to calculate but it could surpass 10,000 in the last five years, according to embassies and various media reports. According to a report of the Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment Ministry prepared on 110 female returnees from Saudi Arabia, 35 percent of them returned after being physically and sexually abused. Forty-four percent of them were not paid regularly.
So why can’t we simply ban the trade of sending our women to the Middle East when it is known that one third of them are being regularly abused? There should be a complete ban on sending women there. It is quite obvious that we have been totally unable to stop the horrific violence that upto a third of them undergo.
It is joblessness and harsh poverty that husbands of women like Nodi are forced to sending their wives to Saudi Arabia and other countries of Middle East. It is the government’s responsibility not to be too greedy for foreign exchange and send our women to the Middle Eastern countries to be brutalised and killed.
