The suggestion made by participants in a national dialogue on 'Policies addressing labour and mobility' for exploration of caregivers' job in order to curtail female migrants' abuse sounds very simplistic. It is the women who go abroad, particularly to a few Middle-east countries, as domestic helps are sexually abused by their employers. To become caregivers and nurses, women have to have a minimum level of academic education and well organised training. A good number of professional nurses from Bangladesh have long been serving in hospitals and healthcare facilities abroad with reputation. There is hardly any news that they are subjected to any kind of abuse, let alone sexual. It is because their service is institutionalised. Domestic helps are doubly vulnerable because they work in an unfamiliar family environment and are helpless. Also, monitoring of their location is non-existent. They are often left incommunicado deliberately by their employers.
Now the concept of the service of caregivers is a recent one but getting popular fast, particularly in developed countries where the number of elderly people is on the rise. Someone intending to serve as a caregiver may not have to undergo the academic and training regimentation for four to five years but still have to finish at least school education and take a short training course. The majority of women leaving the country with the job of domestic help will not qualify for employment as caregivers. Accepted that this may open an avenue for women not making it to higher education but completing at least school and college education. They will take care of the elderly or sick people at home and will not be as vulnerable to abuses like domestic helps. Yet the chances cannot be completely ruled out in countries where domestic helps are sexually abused. The mentality of employers there is responsible for physical and sexual violence.
An office-bearer of the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA) has made a valid point. The point is that middlemen or intermediaries should be done away with from the recruitment process. Involvement of intermediaries is responsible for creation of problems both for male and female migrants. That male workers die at a young age in foreign lands at an alarming rate often goes unnoticed. There is no system to determine the exact cause of their death. This is unacceptable. One can understand if there are accidental deaths in workplaces. But often bodies of young and apparently healthy workers are sent back without clear reference to disease. This is suspect.
So, the need is to make the process of recruitment as transparent as possible. If the diplomatic mission of Bangladesh maintains a data base of each and every migrant recruited in the country it is based, there should be no problem to know the condition of the job the workers are performing. A hot line for the migrant workers will be there to complain or inform if they face an adverse situation or feel intimidated. In this age of digitisation, no migrant worker including domestic helps should be left at the mercy and whims of his or her employer.
