Less than a week after arriving in the UK from Africa, Rose realised that she had made a terrible mistake. First, her passport was taken from her at the airport by her new employers. Then the promises that her employers had made began to disappear. Insults turned into slaps. One day she missed a call from her boss. “She beat me from upstairs to downstairs, dragging me. I was just crying and crying,” she says. “The more I cry, the more she beat me. She said, ‘Keep quiet, keep quiet. In this country you are not allowed to cry. The police will come’.”
The police didn’t come. Migrant domestic workers such as Rose (her name has been changed) tend to pass unnoticed through our day-to-day lives. The recipients of these visas — more than 16,500 are issued each year — come to work as housekeepers or nannies, gardeners or cooks, and live a closeted existence inside private houses. Many are treated well but their isolation, their dependence on their employers and a lack of clarity over their rights can leave them open to abuse.
Rose had come here to work as a nanny. She thought the pay would allow her to educate her brothers and her daughter back home. Instead, she was deprived of her wages and made to work as a skivvy. “I was in a prison, a cage, a slave,” she says. “I had no family, I had no friends. There was a point where I was even thinking I should commit suicide.”
Luckily for Rose, her cries did not go completely unheard. One night, her neighbour Abigail heard her wailing coming through the wall as she was putting her daughter to bed. Not even the roar of traffic past the row of townhouses was loud enough to muffle it. The sobs became so persistent that Abigail rang the bell of the house next door, convinced that someone had died. There was no answer.
Abigail often saw Rose taking the children next door to school or heard her singing sad songs to herself in the garden, so when she saw her across the fence the next day, she asked about the crying. Then she noticed Rose’s inflamed eye. “When she told me that she’d been beaten, it made me literally step back in horror. I couldn’t believe what had been going on next door to me.”
Advertisement
Shocked into action, Abigail took Rose’s mobile number and through furtive calls over several days arranged for her to throw a bag of essentials over the fence and escape to a safe house. “I’m not an interfering person but I didn’t have a choice. It was such a clear case of right and wrong.”
Abigail intoduced Rose to Kalayaan, a charity that has campaigned for the rights of domestic workers in Britain since 1987.
Tucked behind the St Francis of Assisi church, in Notting Hill, West London, it has two rooms: the first has the feel of a church hall about it, with decorations made by the women who seek refuge there and a whiteboard covered with stock phrases from a recent English class. The second room functions as an office where 350 new domestic workers register each year. “When workers come to us it is often the first time they have told their story to anyone,” Camilla Brown, Kalayaan’s community advocate, says. “They are very afraid, very emotional, and find it hard to trust that we are not part of the same system as their employers. Most believe that they are illegal. “A lot of the first couple of sessions is telling people that they don’t need to be afraid any more.”
“It isn’t easy speaking out against your neighbours,” says Abigail. “When I told the other neighbours they were all supportive, but most didn’t want to get involved to the same extent.”
The tales that migrants exchange range from being made to sleep in the garden shed to drinking bleach in despair. More common are the 52 per cent of them earning only £50 a week. Kalayaan’s annual report confronts you with further grim statistics: 60 per cent of the domestic workers it sees have no time off; 59 per cent are not allowed out of the house without supervision; 57 per cent do not have their own room.
Advertisement
Nor do they have anyone to whom to turn. Domestic workers are brought in on individual visas rather than through agencies. This isolation deprives them of the network that other immigrant communities use for support and advice. Almost all of them rely on chance encounters and the kindness of strangers to lead them to the charity.
At Kalayaan’s office, Bella, a young London mother, smiles as she recalls her first encounter with C. She struck up a casual conversation with the Indonesian nanny when she saw her offering her youngest daughter chips in the playground. But their chat quickly darkened.
“I asked her if she had a nice job,” Bella says. “She said ‘Very happy’ and a tear went down her face. Then she said ‘Not very happy’ and looked around nervously. Her next words were, ‘My Madam is coming now. Please, you help me?’”
C’s Middle Eastern employers expected her to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When she once ate an egg from the family fridge, her employers subjected her to a screaming fit. She was paid £100 a month.
“They saw her as a workhorse, not a human being,” says Bella. “She had no idea what her rights were at all. She was disconnected from this millennium.”
Advertisement
But C was not alone. The question of domestic workers’ rights occupies a grey area in British employment law, something that Kalayaan is campaigning to change.
“Kalayaan has collaborated with Oxfam and the TUC to request that the Low Pay Commission amend the National Minimum Wage legislation,” Brown says. “We want to remove any doubt about domestic workers’ entitlement to access this basic protection.”
Employers who call the National Minimum Wage helpline trying to ascertain the rules are often told that if they treat someone as a member of the family in their home, they do not need to pay the minimum wage. Yet the UK Border Agency spells out that domestic workers are entitled to the protection of British employment law. This confusion means that employment tribunals brought by domestic workers against former employers can hang on such minutiae as whether the family bought them an ice cream on an outing, or just made them carry the coats.
Tribunals are notoriously difficult territory. For many domestic workers, the challenge is pitting themselves against their employers’ reputations. The employers, often barristers or doctors, are usually well respected in their community. Until recently, few cases were brought and the majority were either settled out of court or dropped by the worker because of the stress involved.
“Rose’s employers were respected professionals,” Abigail says. “It was hard to believe they’d be the kind of people who would do this.”
Advertisement
For Rose, the judgment in her favour and promise of repaid wages was the spur she needed to rebuild her confidence. She plans to keep the documents and show them to her daughter when she eventually returns to Africa.
“I can’t explain what I’m going through to her now. She’s too little. But I don’t want her to think ‘Mummy doesn’t love me’ and I don’t want her to go through what I’m going through now.”
For many migrant workers, the church provides the only refuge and temporary escape from their domestic ordeals. This was the case for Mary (her name has been changed). Others at her village church in the South of England noticed that the shy African woman always left ten minutes before the service ended. To Ruth, a regular member of the congregation, this seemed unusual but not sinister. It was months before persistent kindliness uncovered the truth: Mary left early at her employers’ insistence. They didn’t want her to tell anyone her story.
After years of working for a British diplomat in Africa, his family had brought Mary back to the UK as a nanny. She was told to bring all her toiletries with her: if she ran out of toothpaste, no one would buy her more. When she arrived, she saw little of the country she had heard so much about. Shut in a house without a key or access to her passport, she sought solace in snatched minutes on the phone to her mother. The family’s upstairs bathroom was out of bounds and she was not allowed downstairs at night.
Such treatment seemed inconceivable to the small rural community who rallied behind her and raised enough money to send her home. “I just couldn’t believe it. The things that had been going on for months beggared belief,” Ruth says, talking in the sitting room where Mary would refuse afternoon tea for fear of needing the bathroom later that night. “It’s the Dark Ages and it’s slavery. That a British family could treat someone like that . . .”
Advertisement
The story of Mary is far from unique among domestic workers brought to the UK under a diplomatic visa. “They are particularly vulnerable to abuse because, unlike other domestic workers, they are tied to their employer. This makes it impossible for them to flee from abuse and exploitation,” Camilla Brown says. Some 88 per cent of those on diplomatic visas seen at Kalayaan have no access to their passports compared with 58 per cent of all migrant domestic workers.
Although Mary could have brought a case against her employers, she refused to do so. Ruth says that Mary was simply too worn down by it all: “She said, ‘I can’t bear it any longer. I just want to go home’.”
Brown says: “For many domestic workers the notion of being able to challenge their employer is inconceivable. There is also a fear of having to come into contact with the employer again, or possible repercussions for their family back home. Often when we have calculated the amount that someone is owed the sum is so terrifying that workers fear being perceived as greedy and explain that they don’t want to cause trouble, they just want to move on.” Small wonder given that 58 per cent of them have suffered psychological abuse like Mary — predominantly at the hands of female employers. Just over a quarter last year were subject to the physical assaults suffered by Rose. And 6 per cent were sexually abused.
J, a petite Filipina, breaks down as she recounts the sexual assault that she hopes her husband will never find out about. Like more than 2,000 of the domestic workers who arrived in the UK last year, she was brought over from Dubai. She had put up with her charges spitting at her, near-starvation and no access to medical care. “It’s better to be a dog because they will buy you better food and take you to the vet when you’re sick. If you’re the maid, they just say . . . ‘Well, you’re not dying, are you?’” she says.
When her employer’s son sexually abused her for the second time, something inside her snapped. “I went to close the door but he was too strong,” she says. “I felt so dirty. It’s always in my shadow.” Still in her maid’s outfit, she walked out of the house and never returned.
Alone, without a passport and able to speak only a little English, J was wandering the streets when another domestic worker spotted her uniform and asked if she needed help. J spent three weeks hiding in the woman’s flat, too scared to go out in case her employer was searching for her.
Finally, her new friend took her to Kalayaan. “I’m so thankful for having them in my life. They gave me the confidence I needed,” J says.
She arrives late today because she has been sorting out the details of a new job with a family whom she likes. “I’m free. I feel so very happy. It’s like I’m a bird. When I go outside, it’s very nice. No one watches what I’m doing.”
For women such as J, a hand over the fence or a phone number smuggled across the playground might be the only way out. Rose believes that public attention — together with the campaigns of charities such as Kalayaan — will prevent this secret slavery in everyday settings.
“Don’t ignore your neighbour, thinking ‘it’s not my business’,” she says. “Ask if that person is OK, keep an eye on that person, try to find out more. Is it true that she’s happy? If people can do that, it can save a life.”
Some of the names have been changed to protect identities