Whenever Elisa goes out in her small town in northeastern Brazil, she fears seeing the family she once considered her own.
After almost three decades of domestic work with no pay and little freedom, Elisa realized that she was a slave and plotted to escape the household where she had lived since the age of seven.
The 38-year-old was rescued in 2018 after alerting the authorities and has started to build a new life, but a reminder of her captivity, fear and exploitation is never too far away.
Illustration: Louise Ting
“Every now and then, I see the family,” she told reporters by telephone from her home in Ipira, a town in Bahia state.
The family told officials that they took Elisa in as a child after she was abandoned by her parents when they separated.
“It is kind of a horrible, difficult feeling,” said Elisa, who did not give her real name for fear of reprisals. “There’s a sense of fear, even though they can’t do anything to me.”
Elisa’s rescue was a rare victory for labor officials, who said that domestic servitude in Brazil is difficult to identify and stop because victims rarely see themselves as modern-day slaves.
Labor inspectors, who can spot check workplaces to check for slavery, said that they need evidence of abuse from victims to obtain permission from a judge to enter a home.
Of 3,513 workers found in slavery-like conditions by officials from 2017 to last year, only 21 were in domestic servitude.
“It is very rare to receive complaints [about domestic servitude] ... as most [victims] never realize they are being abused,” labor prosecutor Ana Lucia Stumpf Gonzalez said.
Advocates fear that the COVID-19 pandemic would result in more domestic workers becoming trapped with abusive employers indefinitely, yet unlikely to speak out or seek help for fear of losing their job.
Even when victims are rescued and their captors prosecuted or fined, officials said that relatively low compensation payments for domestic servitude and the rarity of jail terms for modern slavery mean that exploitative bosses are unlikely to be deterred.
Yet domestic servitude hit the headlines in Brazil in June when authorities found a 61-year-old maid who they judged to have been kept as a slave in a mansion in Sao Paulo for years.
The case shocked the public — she was found living in a shed and her boss worked for Avon.
The beauty company fired the executive and said it would provide financial aid to the victim.
The ex-Avon employee, who along with her husband and mother was charged with enslaving a worker, has denied the charges.
Prosecutors are seeking 1 million reais (US$184,424) in damages.
While there is no data on domestic servitude, government data from 2014 shows about 174,000 children were employed as domestic workers. By law, domestic workers must be at least 18.
Many families in Brazil employ at least one domestic worker.
In some cases, they take in abandoned children to raise as their own, but subject them to domestic servitude, advocates have said.
Labor prosecutor Luciana Coutinho said that the abuse of young maids is underreported, and that it belongs to a “hardcore” class of child labor — along with sexual exploitation and drug trafficking — that is considered particularly difficult to prevent.
Cases only come to light when there is a complaint or a tragedy, “when the child suffers sexual abuse, is beaten or killed, which has unfortunately happened before,” Coutinho said.
If victims are not identified and rescued at a young age, they might never be discovered as adults, labor inspectors said.
“The longer the victim remains in the home environment with deprivation of ... rights, the more difficult it is to [carry out a] rescue,” Brazilian Division for Inspection and Eradication of Slave Labor Head Mauricio Krepsky said.
In 2017, authorities received a tip-off about a domestic worker kept as a slave in Rubim, a town in Minas Gerais state.
The woman, then aged 68, had not been paid for years and her dead husband’s pension was being taken by her boss, yet she struggled to accept that she had been enslaved even after her rescue, according to labor prosecutor Juliane Mombelli who participated in the rescue.
“She thought that she was being protected by the employer, because she was alone in the world — a widow,” Mombelli said.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federation of unions for domestic workers (FENATRAD) said that some employers have forced their maids to stay and threatened to fire them if they went home.
“The employer wants them to stay at work — it’s abuse. In order not to be unemployed, they submit,” FENATRAD president Luiza Batista said.
Authorities and advocates have said that securing compensation is key to helping victims who in many cases have only ever known a life of domestic servitude, and have no education, family or friends.
Yet labor prosecutors said that they are limited by the financial means of the abusers when seeking damages for victims.
In 2017, an employer in Elisio Medrado in Bahia state who exploited his domestic worker from the age of 12 to 52 was ordered to pay her severance worth 79,000 reais.
However, he did not show up at the hearing to finalize the payment, leaving the victim empty-handed, a labor inspector’s report showed.
In Elisa’s case, she was pleased to get about 100,000 reais in damages, severance and back pay from her bosses, although labor prosecutors said that she would have received a much larger sum if she had been exploited by wealthy employers or a company.
The money has allowed Elisa to buy her own house — a far cry from when all of her possessions fit into two desk drawers.
She still cleans houses for a living, but on her own terms and takes home about 35 reais per day — in line with the minimum wage.
“It’s a lot of work for little money, but enough to pay for electricity, water and food,” she said. “You live one day at a time. One thing I’d like to do is study, to get a better job.”
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS