DAILY newspapers have reported that another woman was rescued from the clutches of employers abroad after she was almost forced into prostitution by manpower agency. Victim Nipa was lured with the promise of better employment abroad.
Newspapers reported that one Sharmin Akter an agent for Bangladeshi female migrant workers in Lebanon established contact with Nipa and persuaded her to give up the present job of domestic helper to join a more lucrative offer. Poor Nipa agreed to Sharmin’s proposal, gave-up her job and entered the trap laid by agent Sharmin. It was only when she was taken to 20 other Bangladeshi girls that she realised she was being forced into prostitution by her Bangladeshi agent.
She rejected their proposal and they beat her up and made her starve for days. She escaped with the help of a Lebanese man and now is receiving treatment in the capital’s National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedic Rehabilitation. Breaking all previous records in the outflow of female migrant workers, the country has sent more than 60,000 female workers abroad in the last 11 months, according to BMET statistics.
This newspaper wrote about how female migrant workers are not properly taken care of by the government and like many cases like Nipa, women suffer through awful abuse and trauma but are still not given any form of support or advise regarding their predicament. Considered mere foreign remittance machines by most, these women are faced to sexual and physical harassment, abuse by employers and sometimes not even paid for their services. The government needs to step up and take action after regulating the overseas manpower agencies who recruit people only to cheat them.
Enough sufferings have occurred to women and other migrant workers. Even though the government is failing to ensure proper employment for its people in the country, the least they could do is to ensure that frauds here can’t send workers abroad on false promises and request the manpower importing foreign governments to ensure that their basic human rights are ensured. Even better, they should ensure that no women should be sent at all and instead concentrate on providing them with proper employment in the domestic job market through imparting skill development trainings. Surely our women don’t deserve to be abused both inside and outside our country.
It is our considered view that the government should realise that it is no honourable thing to send our citizens, both male and female, abroad for doing sub-standard or disgraceful jobs rather it is better to train up these manpower as skilled work-force and arrange jobs for them in the domestic markets by revitalising the country’s economy, specially the industrial and service sectors.
