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Beyond Boundaries: A Critical Look at Women Labour Migration

The research aimed to document women labour migration and occurrences of trafficking. In Bangladesh, six sites where women were known to migrate out of country were selected for research. Outside Bangladesh, Kolkata, Mumbai and Kuwait were visited.

Informants were selected among returnees without prejudice as to whether they had been trafficked or not. Returnees’ narratives constitute the richest data of the research. It was completed with interviews with dalals, manpower agents, local leaders and family members of the migrants. To the extent possible, the research moved back and forth between sites of emigration and sites of immigration. In all, 496 case histories of migrant women were recorded out of which 208 had gone to the Middle East, 70 to Kolkata, 190 to Mumbai or Uttar Pradesh and 28 to Malaysia.
 
Migration to the Middle East is characterized by its high cost and even though women pay less than men, visa, plane fare and margin profits of dalals and recruiting agencies add up to a considerable sum. The money provided by a husband, a father, a money lender or an NGO must be recouped, and this obligation exerts tremendous pressure on migrant women to accept whatever work is demanded.
 
A majority of women went to Kuwait, followed by Bahrain and the UAE. The kofala or sponsorship system, characteristic of the Gulf states, applies in all these countries and similar types of visas are issued. 82.2 percent of the women went with (or were promised) domestic visas, the rest went with company visas to work as cleaners in schools and hospitals.   Domestic workers lived in with their employers and had little autonomy; company workers could dispose of their time after performing their 8 hour duty, 5 days a week. A majority, in both categories admitted that sex work was an integral part of their job (domestic workers) or was engaged in on a part time basis, beside their official duty (company workers). Ten percent stated that sex work was their only occupation. Most first time migrants were unprepared for such work but salaries being extremely low they were compelled by economic necessity (company workers) or they had to acquiesce to the demands of their employers in order to keep their jobs (domestic workers). In several households, sex work was conducted under the direct supervision of the employer who used his/her maids as a source of income.
The success of migration is generally measured by the amount of money earned. Slightly more than half (52.4 percent) of the women considered they had been benefited while 38.9 percent said they had been highly benefited. The rate of failure is high: 22.6 percent of the women returned empty handed. Husbands were the most common recipients of remittances and only 9.1 percent of the women kept their savings for themselves.
 
A marked increase in the cheating of women was observed after 1998 following the closure of several migration routes. Promised a contract of 2 to 3 years for a domestic job, women were sent to Dubai on short term visas to do sex work and were forcibly returned within 3 months nearly empty handed. Such practices were considered the worst possible kind of abuse. 
 
Seventy women from Bangladesh were interviewed in Kolkota brothels. As many as 59 (84.3 percent) were considered trafficked and many cases were recent.   Small networks of traffickers were found operating in Satkhira. They recruited candidates from neighbouring villages and among their distant relatives. Some had been arrested by the police and fined but their work was not stopped. Known as traffickers in their community, they had become powerful and no one dared oppose or expose them. Local arbitration (shalish) was poorly equipped to deal with them. 
 
Migration to Mumbai is not new. In the sixties and seventies, poor families from Jessore and Satkhira begged their way to the big city. Work for women in bars became widely available after 1990. Bar work often entailed sex work but not necessarily so. Women engaged in it with the permission of their husbands/families. Dalals played a lesser role. Motivators and recruiters were mainly relatives, neighbours and parents. There were "contract marriages" whereby a man married for the purpose of migration to Mumbai. Marriage protected him from accusation of trafficking and he could claim 50 percent of his wife's income. Exploitation at the core of families or between "married' partners took place under the cover of powerful ideologies which are constitutive of moral order.   They threatened the very fabric of society. Here 31 percent of the informants were considered to have been trafficked, 41 percent were not trafficked and 28 percent were in an undermined category.
 
The location/ocupations of Bangladeshi women abroad, which were documented in this study are a partial recknoning of a much larger field remaining to be explored and researched.
The study concluded by recommending that the ban on the migration of unskilled women labour to the Middle East be lifted as it did not prevent women from migrating nor protect their rights. It suggested an uninhibited recognition of women migration as a fact and as a right. Human rights abuse suffered by both men and women should not be read with different lenses and sex work in itself should not be a criterion of "trafficking". The money earned and the autonomy exerted by women in this activity largely determined whether they considered themselves to be trafficked or not.
 
Migratory routes differed markedly and so did the modalities of trafficking. Organizations implementing anti-trafficking programs should be knowledgeable about the situation prevailing in their locality and adjust messages accordingly.   The use of words like "mafia" or the depiction of traffickers as villain outsiders do not correspond to the actual garb taken by most traffickers.   Research findings should guide anti-trafficking programmes.
 
 
 
 
Year of publication: 
2002
Theme: 
Migration and Mobility
Author: 
Therese Blanchet
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