migrant women in the United Arab Emirates

eaten, humiliated, etc., during the course of their employment. The following sub-section
relates experiences of foreign female domestic workers interviewed for this study.
Damages
Once the foreign female domestic worker enters the United Arab Emirates household,
she fits into the structural relations of this household, becoming part of the “harem.”
However, she is not considered one of the regular female members of the household,
because her status is lower. She is supposed to accomplish some female functions, like
cleaning, washing, cooking, taking care of children, but her status is really that of a subwoman.
Her role is to relieve the real women of house of the dirty side of housework, and
ultimately to give them higher status, and more time to engage in social life and in other
aspects of the modern female role. A foreign female domestic worker in a United Arab
Emirates household not only helps the women of the house to attain a higher status, she
also serves the whole household so that it can accommodate itself to the new lifestyle of
leisure and modernity.
A United Arab Emirates household, like any other household, is full of love, affection
and personal care, but also tension, aggression and conflicts. When the foreign female
domestic worker enters the household, she enters a whole New World of complications
and challenges. She has no previous idea of this particular household’s dynamics or its
interpersonal and inter-structural relationships and she is not equipped to handle them. In
addition to her help and support, she herself brings factors of change for the family for
which the family is not usually prepared. The family brings the foreign female domestic
worker into the household as any new consumer goods, and most of the time its members
do not take the possible consequences into account. The repercussions of this abrupt
change are complications, tensions, conflicts, and the possibility of domestic violence.
The foreign female domestic worker’s position as the lowest-status within the United
Arab Emirates household make them vulnerable to violence. Along with their low social
status, their stereotyped image in United Arab Emirates society makes them easy targets
and scapegoats for some facets of the emerging dysfunctional aspects of the United Arab
Emirates family. The violence and damage they receive cannot only be measured by the
violent act of an individual household member at a particular moment. Rather, violence
can also be an accumulated set of acts, shaped by the history of United Arab Emirates
society and its views on domestic work. It is also the result of the United Arab Emirates
household’s continuous interaction with the new and of ongoing changes in United Arab
Emirates society as well.
In telling their stories of abuse, the foreign female domestic workers complained
more frequently of verbal abuse than they did of sexual and physical abuse. Labour
attachés, recruiting agencies and migration officers have all mentioned the tendency of the
United Arab Emirates employer to inflict verbal abuse on foreign female domestic
workers. Half of the foreign female domestic workers interviewed reported being abused,
verbally, physically or otherwise.
Physical abuse was the second most frequently reported form of abuse. Three foreign
female domestic workers reported sexual abuse. Although relatively few incidents of
sexual abuse were reported in this study, in comparison with other forms of abuse, it
remains significant, because sexual abuse is a difficult issue to talk about. Another factor
contributing to the low number of sexual abuse incidents reported in this sample is the area
UAE Working Paper_1 27