Last Sunday, some 40 female workers, mostly from Saudi Arabia, returned home leaving behind a terrible experience of sexual abuse, physical torture and payment irregularities of wages. Furthermore, they returned empty handed. They landed at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in the evening and were found to be at a loss as to how to go home and show their faces to family members, relatives and neighbours.
Nevertheless, the latest batch of female workers returned after more than 100 returned home from Saudi Arabia two weeks ago in two batches with similar tales of torture and abuse by their employers who reportedly treated women as sex slaves.
The million dollar question in this regard, why the government is sending such unskilled female workers to the Gulf countries and particularly to Saudi Arabia despite repeated protests from civil society leaders and human rights organizations to ban sending female workers due to lack of security and protection. Already, other countries such as Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Philippines have stopped sending their female workers on safety grounds. Why Bangladesh government is still sending women workers when the question of national dignity is also at stake?
Reasonably enough, the government has focused to increase the number of its success stories – especially exporting the local workforce to international markets – therefore exhibit increased earnings from foreign remittance inflow.
However, remittance inflow, in any manner, should not come at the cost of the physical and mental humiliation suffered by our women workers sent to Saudi Arabia. We warned before about the reputation in the Middle East that generally they use our girls like prostitutes. The government did not pay any heed but earned money by sending to be abused.
Any responsible government would felt ashamed and guilty for sending our girls to be abused and tortured. Our government is so anxious to earn money that suffering our women does not matter.
They should have protested strongly through the ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that as Muslims their men have behaved disgracefully to our women and send them without paying their dues. That as a nation we feel insulted. That should not be happened.
The government has been making money by using our girls abroad and the government must take responsibility for their treatments as well compensate for the losses. We want our government to be responsible and reasonable.
