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IV. Child domestic workers

Domestic work is the largest employment category for girls under sixteen worldwide, according to the International Labour Organization.¹¹⁰ Although reaching and counting child domestic workers—indeed, domestic workers in general—is difficult, the child labor branch of the ILO, the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), has attempted to estimate the numbers of girls engaged in domestic service in a variety of countries. A 2002-2003 baseline survey conducted by the IPEC and the University of Indonesia estimated that there were 2.6 million domestic workers in Indonesia, out of whom at minimum 688,132 (26 percent) were children; 93 percent of those were girls under the age of eighteen.¹¹¹ In El Salvador, IPEC used data from the Salvadoran census bureau to conclude that approximately 21,500 youths between the ages of fourteen and nineteen work in domestic service. Some 20,800—over 95 percent of these youths—are girls and women.¹¹²

A 2004 study by the ILO, UNICEF and the World Bank in Morocco found that child domestic workers are “perhaps the most vulnerable group of urban child workers.”¹¹³ A 2001 study by the Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science estimated that between 66,000 and 86,000 girls under fifteen were working as child domestic workers, and a 2001 government survey found 13,580 girls under fifteen working as domestics in the greater Casablanca area alone.¹¹⁴ Of the girls in the Casablanca survey, 870 were under eleven years old.¹¹⁵

In the general context of poverty, girls are also pushed into domestic work by poor quality education and poor access to education, broken families and violence in the home, and widespread acceptance of child labor in many countries. Girls typically migrate from villages to work as domestics in urban areas after they become available for work when prohibitive education-related costs force them to abandon their schooling, or after they are removed from school to contribute to their families’ income. In some countries, there may be a particular demand for girl domestic workers because they can be paid lower wages (if paid at all), and are considered easier to control and less likely or able to report abuses or to escape.

Many child domestic workers find employment through formal and informal intermediaries, typically with some kind of parental involvement, in a process often marred by deception, incomplete information, false promises and onerous fees. In Morocco, most child domestic workers we interviewed had been placed by brokers working within an unregulated system that facilitates abuse. Brokers receiving a portion of a girl’s monthly salary have an incentive to ensure she keeps working, and so may prevent her parents from hearing about abuse. In some cases, the broker acts as an intermediary between employer and parents, collecting the child’s salary and delivering it to her parents, who may not even know her exact whereabouts. In Indonesia, licensed employment agencies may legally recruit children over the age of fifteen for domestic work, though many girls also find employment through informal intermediaries including friends, relatives, or are recruited directly by employers.

As the stories of child domestic workers described throughout this report demonstrate, girls are not spared the appalling array of abuses suffered by all domestic workers. Indeed, in many instances, their youth exacerbates their position of helplessness and disempowerment vis-à-vis employers. Abuses such as confinement, prohibition on socializing with peers, and food deprivation may have longer-term physical and psychological consequences for younger workers than their adult counterparts. In many of the cases documented by Human Rights Watch in Indonesia, Morocco and El Salvador, girl domestic workers suffered specific sets of violations of their internationally-protected rights as children. These girls performed work that met the international definition of a “worst form of child labor.” They were routinely denied the right to education and separated from their families for long periods of time.  

Worst forms of child labor

International law does not prohibit child labor in itself, in recognition of the potential benefits of some forms of work and of the realities that require many children to enter the workforce to support their own or their families’ basic needs. But international law does require states to set a minimum age for employment and to eliminate the “worst forms” of child labor.

The CRC guarantees children the right “to be protected from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.”¹¹⁶ The ILO’s Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, adopted in 1999 and ratified by 150 countries worldwide, develops the prohibition on harmful or hazardous work more fully. Under the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, some forms of child labor are flatly prohibited, such as slavery or practices similar to slavery. Other types of work are prohibited if they constitute “work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children.”¹¹⁷

ILO recommendations for what constitutes hazardous labor under the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention include work that “exposes children to physical, psychological or sexual abuse” or involves “particularly difficult conditions such as work for long hours or during the night or work where the child is unreasonably confined to the premises of the employer.”¹¹⁸

Research findings from Human Rights Watch, local NGOs, UNICEF, and the ILO sadly demonstrate how often these conditions are met. Girl domestic workers put in excruciatingly long hours—sometimes up to eighteen hours a day—with little or no time to rest. Those who care for younger children are “on call” around the clock, and obliged to work during the night to tend to infants. Girls are just as likely as adult women workers, if not more so, to be confined to the household where they work. The stories of beaten, belittled, sexually harassed and raped girls recounted in Chapter II, above, illustrate how domestic work exposes girls to physical, psychological or sexual abuse.

An ILO-IPEC study in Indonesia found that child domestics perform the same amount of work as adult workers, which tends to surpass their physical capacity and stamina.¹¹⁹  The same study noted that working long hours with no time for rest and recreation or for socializing with peers affects a child’s mental, physical, social, and intellectual development.¹²⁰ In many instances, the tasks performed by child domestic workers are inappropriate to their age and physical strength because they involve heavy lifting, exposure to toxic cleaning chemicals, or risks of burns or cuts during food preparation. Children working extremely long hours risk health problems and are more prone to accidents even when engaged in work that would not normally be dangerous.¹²¹ Heavy lifting can damage or stunt growing bones and muscles, while prolonged exposure to hot water, harsh cleaning agents, and dust can trigger asthma, allergies, eczema and other diseases of the skin.

Separation from family

I had no day off. Even though my parents were twenty kilometers away, I was not allowed to visit them. I felt like I was in jail. I was not allowed to go out. I had no friends. My family could not visit me. I felt hopeless.
—Hasana, Indonesian domestic worker who began work at age twelve, Yogyakarta, December 4, 2004

Child domestic workers, sometimes as young as three, are often separated from their families for long periods of time and prohibited from visiting or telephoning them by employers. This separation, combined with other restrictions such as confinement in the household, leaves them especially vulnerable to abuse and prevents them from seeking help.

Employers often argue that restricting movement is necessary to ensure a child’s security. Merpati, an Indonesian girl who was fifteen when she worked for an employer who locked her indoors, recalled, “The employer forbade [me] from going out of the house or contacting my family. She would lock the door from the outside. She said that I would be protected if the door was locked. At first I felt okay, but then I felt confined. I was home all day and never went outside.”¹²² In her first job as a domestic worker when she was ten years old, Moroccan Rasha A. was locked indoors every time her employers left the household.¹²³ Sixteen-year-old Samira M. told us her employers in Morocco didn’t let her go out “except to take out the garbage.”¹²⁴

The ILO-IPEC study in Indonesia found that employers were more likely to restrict a child’s communication with her family than an adult worker’s, and noted that they did so because they were afraid child domestic workers would “mix with the wrong crowd,” would report their employers’ mistreatment, or seek better employment.¹²⁵ A UNICEF general study published in 1999 notes that “[a] sense of being enslaved is reinforced where the child [domestic worker] is not allowed to leave the house. In Asia, this is common, although imposed in the name of the girl’s personal security… Loss of freedom is the ultimate human rights abuse.”¹²⁶

In interviews with child domestic workers in Morocco and Indonesia, Human Rights Watch learned that most girls endured abusive situations until a religious holiday gave them the opportunity to go home. Amina L. told us she was able to leave her first job, which she started when she was eight, in this way. “I would eat alone, sleep alone, and I didn’t go to school. The work was very hard so I didn’t stay very long. When I went home I cried and refused to go back.”¹²⁷ Typically working in cities some distance from their rural homes, many girls are unable to contemplate running away for any number of reasons, including physical confinement in the household, lack of money or knowledge about how to return home, employers’ threats of violence or denunciation to the police, and girls’ own fears about getting lost or attacked if they left the workplace.

When family members do visit girls in the workplace, the visits are typically short and sometimes are monitored by employers, giving girls little opportunity to convince families who depend on their incomes that the abuses are severe enough to warrant leaving the job. When she was ten, Moroccan Rasha A. was routinely beaten by her employers and threatened with more beatings if she told her parents:

If something happened—if I broke something or did something badly—they would beat me with a shoe or a belt on any part of my body. I couldn’t leave the house, they would lock the door when they left…. Both the husband and the wife hit me. My family saw me twice in the year that I worked. They came to visit me at the house but the employer sat with us during the visit and told me not to say anything bad or she would beat me more. When my mother came the last time to visit I told her I wouldn’t stay at that house anymore. I said, “either I go with you or I will run away or kill myself.”¹²⁸

Infrequent contact between parents and children may make parents less able to recognize signs of abuse, particularly if parents’ desire to protect their children conflicts with their desire for the child to continue earning much-needed income.  Conversely, children who feel intense pressure to provide for their families may be slower to complain to parents about abusive employers if they feel that it will do no good or that their families depend on them.

Many girl domestic workers in Indonesia spoke of despondency and depression as a result of separation from their families. Vina, who began working when she was thirteen, recalled, “I was always depressed because I could not leave the house to visit my mother or sister. No one came to visit me. It was not allowed.”¹²⁹ Dita became a domestic worker at age fifteen. She told us, “I felt oppressed, not free. I was always told what to do and had no time to rest. I was not allowed to go out. I was told that I could not go home to see my family. It made me depressed.”¹³⁰

Isolating child domestics from their parents negatively affects a child’s self-esteem and sense of identity, and inhibits normal childhood development. For instance, Anti-Slavery International notes that an employer rarely assumes a parental role other than in a disciplinary way, and fails to encourage the child, or guide the child to develop personally.¹³¹ According to a 2002 ILO background report on child domestic workers, the isolation of child domestics from their peers and family, “when compounded by verbal, physical abuse and harassment can at times result in personality disorders.”¹³²

Education denied

My parents took me out of school because we had no money to pay for school fees. I was very upset. I studied hard and had good grades.  I remember crying a lot.
—Hasana, Indonesian girl who began domestic work at age twelve, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, December 4, 2004

Domestic labor by children directly interferes with their right to education. Education costs that are beyond the reach of many poor families push many girls out of school and into domestic labor. Once employed in domestic work, few children are allowed to continue their education.

Poverty is perhaps the single greatest contributor to the phenomenon of child labor. The vast majority of the girl domestic workers Human Rights Watch has interviewed around the world come from poor, rural families unable to forego income from all available members of the family. For children in families living near or below the poverty line, death, divorce or disability of a wage earner in the household can overwhelm already fragile coping mechanisms, increasing the likelihood that children will be sent to work to replace lost income. School fees and related costs of schooling—such as textbooks, uniforms, and transportation—often put education beyond children’s reach. Girls are especially likely to be pulled out of school, start late, or never attend at all because of cultural biases against girls attending school leading families to “save” money by keeping girls out of school and/or sending them to work to help pay for the education of male siblings. Denial of the right to education all too often leaves girls without the skills and knowledge they need to find better jobs, participate fully in society, and exercise their other rights.

Barriers to education

For poor families, the direct and indirect costs of education can be prohibitive. Ami’s story is typical. An Indonesian domestic worker, Ami began working when she was thirteen after she was unable to continue her education beyond elementary school: “I went to junior school… [but] after a week, the school asked me to pay [a down payment] and my parents couldn’t pay the money. So I left the school. I wanted to go and when I had to leave I was so sad. I would like to go back to school.”¹³³  

Other factors contributing to pulling girls out of school and pushing them into child labor include lack of identity documents (such as birth certificates), and cultural biases against girls attending school. Several of the girls interviewed in Morocco, where the law provides for free and compulsory education from age six to fifteen, said they were unable to enroll or to continue in school because they were not registered at birth. Abeer T., twenty-one, said, “I didn’t go to school. My mother didn’t let the girls go to school, only the two boys.”¹³⁴

Working in order to attend school

In El Salvador, Human Rights Watch spoke with many girls who began domestic work in order to pay for their education. Under Salvadoran law, state schools must provide basic education, from first through ninth grades, free of charge. Nevertheless, many schools charge matriculation fees or “voluntary” monthly assessments, and most require students to wear uniforms they must purchase themselves. Girls who are determined to continue their education are often forced to work during school vacations to cover these costs that their families cannot afford. Dalia R., fourteen, works during her school vacation to help her mother pay for her education:

I work for [the money to pay for] it on vacation, and my mother saves money to pay for my uniform and school supplies… I have to buy books, but I haven’t yet because I need to wait until my mother has the money. My mother earns very little. We use the money for daily things.¹³⁵

Other girls worked full-time as domestic workers and attended night school. Larger cities like San Salvador and Santa Ana offer this important opportunity to working children, but traveling to and from school at night may carry risks, especially for girls. Alma S. left two different jobs because she was only allowed to attend school at night and feared for her safety during the journey. “It was dangerous,” she said of her first job, because the school was far away from where she worked. She left the second job after her employer insisted she give up attending morning classes. “I had to look after the children. I was going to school in the morning, but then I couldn’t go… so I came back here [to night school].” She gave up that job after an elderly woman was attacked on the street near the house where she worked. “San Salvador is dangerous,” she repeated.¹³⁶

In Indonesia, some children are recruited by labor agents, or sent to work by their parents, on the promise that their employers will send the child to school in return for domestic service. All too often, these promises are not kept out. Of thirty-nine girls interviewed by Human Rights Watch, only one was attending formal school. Hasana (quoted at the opening of this section), for example, began working when she was twelve with the understanding she would be able to go to school. “I was very happy at first… My employer kept promising me that he would send me to school, but he never did—he lied.”¹³⁷ Girls working as domestics in Morocco also reported being promised repeatedly they would be sent to school, but with the exception of a few children enrolled in non-formal education classes, this never happened.

The effect of work on education

Girls who are fortunate and determined enough to continue their education while working may miss classes or days at school due to work obligations, or be too exhausted to do their homework or study effectively. One former domestic worker in El Salvador, I.G., now an adult, explained, “Sometimes when I had lessons I had to cook, I had things to do: cooking, washing, ironing, cleaning. Sometimes I didn’t have enough time to prepare for school. Sometimes I would put my books up in the kitchen. I was not a good or a bad student, just an average one.”¹³⁸

Indeed, it is hard to imagine a child being able to succeed in school while working the exhausting jobs documented in this report. Wardina, the only girl we met in Indonesia who was able to attend school while working as a live-in domestic worker, described her situation:

Everyday I wake up at 5 a.m. I clean the house, wash clothes, and water the plants. At 12 p.m. I go to school. School ends at 5:30 p.m. and I go back to work, prepare dinner, clean the table, and wash the dishes. Before I go to sleep, I do some homework, but I am very tired by then and not able to study. The employer also has a small business. When she receives an order to bake cookies, I have to help her. This delays me going to school.¹³⁹

Seventeen-year-old Flor N. worked as a day domestic worker in San Salvador. She rose at 2 a.m. every day to get to work by 4:30 a.m., having to walk one kilometer on a dangerous road known for gang activity to catch a bus. She worked for thirteen hours—“It’s heavy work: washing, ironing, taking care of the child”—before heading to her fifth grade evening class.  “Sometimes I get to school super tired,” she said. “I get up at 2 a.m. to go to work. I leave school at 7:30 p.m. and get home about 8 p.m. I have dinner and sleep for about five hours.”¹⁴⁰

As one ILO-IPEC officer in Indonesia exclaimed, “Education after working hours is torture. How can [working children] go to school after working ten hours?” ¹⁴¹ ILO-IPEC studies in Bandung, Medan, and Sulawesi in Indonesia on the effects of work on education found that “a child is able to combine only three hours of work per day in order to effectively study at the same time.”¹⁴²

International human rights law and government response

International legal standards prohibiting hazardous and exploitative child labor are discussed earlier in this report. In addition to these protections, international law also addresses a child’s right to education and contact with his or her family.

The CRC affirms a child’s right to be in regular and direct contact with her parents and prohibits arbitrary interference with a child’s family.¹⁴³ Separation from their families can contribute to cumulative psychological harm of abusive situations, in contravention of the right of children to the highest attainable standard of health and their physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.¹⁴⁴

The UDHR, CRC and the ICESCR guarantee the right to education. These instruments dictate that primary education “must be compulsory and available free to all.”¹⁴⁵ Secondary education, including vocational education, must be “available and accessible to every child,” and states parties must “take appropriate measures, such as the introduction of free education and offering financial assistance in case of need.”¹⁴⁶ In addition, the CRC obligates states parties “to take measures to encourage regular attendance at school and the reduction of drop-out rates.”¹⁴⁷ State parties to CEDAW are obligated to end discrimination against girls in education, including access to schooling, reduction of female student drop-out rates, and programs for girls who have left school prematurely.”¹⁴⁸

The ILO Convention No. 138 concerning the Minimum Age for Admission to Employment (“Minimum Age Convention”) provides that the minimum age for employment “shall not be less than the age of completion of compulsory schooling and, in any case, shall not be less than 15 years.”¹⁴⁹ An exception is made for a state “whose economy and educational facilities are insufficiently developed,” which may “initially specify a minimum age of 14 years.¹⁵⁰ The Convention further states that national laws “may also permit the employment or work of persons who are at least fifteen years of age but have not yet completed their compulsory schooling” provided the work “is not likely to be harmful to their health or development” and does not prejudice their attendance at school or participation in vocational training programs.

Acknowledging exploitation of child domestic workers is the first critical step to eliminating the worst forms of child domestic labor. Yet governments often turn a blind eye. In El Salvador and Indonesia, government officials consistently denied the problem, despite statistics suggesting widespread employment of young girls in domestic labor, and numerous testimonies of abuse. Although estimates suggest that one out of every five girls or women between the ages of ten and nineteen in El Salvador who has or is seeking a job is a domestic worker, the Salvadoran director general of labor at the time of our research in 2003 told us, “Really the work of minors in domestic service is very little. Few minors are working as domestics. Very few.”¹⁵¹ Government officials in Indonesia insisted that child domestic workers are “devotees” under the protection of the families for whom they work, exchanging their work for food and accommodation in keeping with a long-standing cultural tradition.

As a result, El Salvador and Indonesia have not prioritized child domestic labor in their time-bound programs to eliminate the worst forms of child labor. Time-bound programs, undertaken with the assistance of ILO-IPEC, are “a set of integrated and coordinated policies and interventions with clear goals, specific targets and a defined time frame, aimed at preventing and eliminating a country’s [worst forms of child labor].” Although an IPEC study in El Salvador concluded that domestic work was among the worst forms of child labor, the Salvadoran government has not identified child domestic labor as a priority in its time-bound program. The Indonesian government did include domestic labor in a 2002 National Plan of Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labor, but omitted this category from the priority areas for the first phase of the twenty-year action plan.¹⁵²

Child domestic work is likely to be excluded from the time-bound program Morocco is currently developing because the Moroccan government “doesn’t consider child domestic labor by children over fifteen to be hazardous labor,” according to ILO-IPEC.¹⁵³ The government is also expected to produce a ten-year National Plan of Action on Childhood in the near future. The Plan will reportedly include a focus on eliminating the worst forms of child labor, including child domestic labor.

In the absence of targeted programs, rigorous enforcement of minimum age laws and other regulations could help rescue the youngest child domestic workers. In Indonesia, for example, the law sets the minimum working age of all children at 15 and prohibits children under age 18 from performing work that is hazardous to their health, safety or morals. While this law is applicable to domestic work, in practice it is rarely enforced. In Morocco, where the minimum working age is also fifteen, the Ministry of Labor has done little to enforce the law, citing the inability of labor inspectors to enter private households. And in El Salvador, which has a minimum working age of fourteen, provisions regulating the work of minors are so riddled with contradictions that children are effectively left without protection and labor inspectors may not be aware of restrictions on child domestic labor. For example, children under fourteen and those who have not yet completed compulsory education “may not be employed in any form of work,” but children twelve and above may perform “light work” that does not prejudice their health or development and does not interfere with their education.¹⁵⁴

Efforts to address the barriers to formal and non-formal education that drive girls into work at young ages and the difficulties of working girls to continue their schooling have been insufficient. School fees, even where national law provides for free and compulsory education, and education-related costs, continue to put education beyond the reach of many children. Salvadoran law guarantees free basic education in grades one through nine, and the Ministry of Education has issued guidelines eliminating school fees and ensuring that rules about uniforms not obstruct a child’s right to attend school. Many schools, however, continue to charge matriculation fees or “voluntary” monthly assessments, and most require students to wear uniforms. In practice, students are often turned away from school if they do not have a uniform.

In Morocco, too, education from age six to fifteen is compulsory and free under the law. And yet many of the child domestic workers we interviewed in that country cited school fees and related costs as the reason they did not enroll in school or dropped out. Morocco has made advances in expanding primary school enrollment, especially in rural areas and among girls, but only 8 percent of Moroccan working girls also attend school—the second lowest attendance rate for any country outside of sub-Saharan Africa.

Indonesian law guarantees the right to basic education from age seven through fifteen. However, school fees have not been abolished, and schools charge tuition and infrastructure fees. The 2003 education law codifies funding for education as a “shared responsibility” of the national and regional governments, and the “community.” The law in Indonesia does not require employers to allow working children to attend school, and does not limit the working hours of children legally employed over the age of fifteen in order to provide time for schooling. A Ministry of Education official said, “We… can’t say that if anyone prevents a child from going to school, it violates Indonesia’s policy on education because currently the government is unable to provide education for all.”¹⁵⁵

Non-formal education and vocational training can provide important opportunities for children to transition back to formal education or acquire skills that will allow them to seek higher-paying, safer employment. Here too, however, governments have not taken adequate steps to ensure availability of these types of programs and access for child domestic workers. In Morocco, government-run, non-formal education programs do exist, but they are poorly designed and under-funded. There are no government-administered, non-formal educational programs targeting domestic workers in Indonesia. Since 2003, ILO-IPEC, in cooperation with local NGOs, offers vocational classes for child domestic workers in the greater Jakarta area, but these programs were being phased out in mid-2006 as allocated funding ran out. A similar program operated by UNICEF also ended in December 2004 for lack of funds. Though laudable, both these programs and governmental programs in Morocco are flawed from the outset because the potential beneficiaries can only participate at the employer’s whim.

Recommendations

To Heads of State and Government, and Parliaments

• Ratify and implement ILO Convention No. 138 concerning the Minimum Age of Admission to Employment and ILO Convention No. 182 and Recommendation No. 190 concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour.

To Labor Ministries

• With the assistance of the International Labour Organization, institute and implement a time-bound program to eliminate the worst forms of child labor, prioritizing child domestic labor as a key target sector.
• Strictly enforce fifteen as the minimum age of employment for all employment sectors, including domestic labor, and enact regulations to provide for sanctions against every labor recruiter and employer, including employers in the informal sector, who recruit and employ children under fifteen.
• By law require employers to register with the appropriate local authority the name and age of each domestic worker working in their homes; and authorize civil society groups to monitor compliance with the minimum age law and workplace abuses and to promptly report violations to local authorities and the police.
• Adopt regulations to prescribe a reasonable number of hours of work during the day that children aged fifteen and older may work, to ensure that work does not interfere with their schooling.
• Provide labor inspectors with the resources and training necessary to effectively monitor child labor, including child domestic labor, and to refer for prosecution those responsible for abusing working children.

To Ministries of Education

• Ensure that all children enjoy the right to free and compulsory basic education. In particular, identify and implement strategies to remove barriers to formal education, such as school fees and related costs and birth registration.
• Ensure that all working children, including those in the informal sector, have access to primary and secondary education, including vocational training, by prescribing a maximum number of hours a child may work per day.