• Sheet of paper Report

EXPLOITED for profit, FAILED by governments: Indonesian migrant domestic workers trafficked to Hong Kong

December 2, 2013

“The wife physically abused me on a regular basis. She forcibly cut my hair with the pretext that my hair had fallen in their food but that was absurd because I didn't cook for them. Once she ordered her two dogs to bite me. I had about ten bites on my body, which broke the skin and bled. She recorded it on her mobile phone, which she constantly played back laughing. When one of the dogs vomited, she forced my face down to the vomit ordering me to eat it, but I refused. When I asked her why she kept abusing me in this way, she told me that it was because she was bored so this is how she passed the time.”
— NS, a 26-year-old woman from Jakarta

Out of 319,325 migrant domestic workers in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR), about half are Indonesian and nearly all are women. Indonesians must migrate via recruitment agencies that are registered with their Government.

This report is a detailed examination of the experiences of Indonesian migrant domestic workers, from their recruitment in Indonesia to their employment in Hong Kong, and documents a series of human and labour rights violations that these workers are subject to in both territories.

The findings are based on 97 in-depth interviews conducted in Indonesia and Hong Kong (from May 2012 to March 2013) with recent migrant domestic workers who had encountered problems during the migration process, as well as interviews with recruitment agencies and relevant government departments in both territories. Amnesty International’s findings were also compared with survey data collected by the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union (IMWU), between July and September 2011 from a random sample of 930 Indonesian migrant domestic workers.

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