Her eyes were blood shot. She was heaving big breaths, her shoulders were shaking. Clenched in her hand was a wet, used tissue.

“I didn’t expect Hong Kong would be like this,” she told the judge.

“This” was to be a place where she could find work, make some money, and send that money home to the Philippines. “This” was supposed to be a safe place.

The woman was a foreign domestic helper, a nanny, who had recently filed charges against her employer for assault and attempted rape.

She was called to be a witness in the case, and today was the second day of cross-examination.

Her former employer’s defense lawyer exhaustively went over previous statements and testimonies to point out discrepancies in her recounting of the events.

Foreign domestic helpers, mostly from the Phillippines, Indonesia and Thailand, spread out across Hong Kong's public spaces on Sunday, their day off.

In this Hong Kong courtroom, interpreters murmured translations simultaneously. Beside the nanny, sat a woman who spoke Tagalog and English, and beside the nanny’s former employer, a man repeated the court’s proceedings rapidly in Cantonese.

There are approximately 140,000 Filipinos in Hong Kong. Most of them are domestic helpers, maids and nannies, who make the move to Hong Kong for a higher salary than they could ever make at home.

That salary is a minimum of $3,580 Hong Kong Dollars a month, about $460 USD.

The foreign domestic helpers must live-in with their employers. If, for whatever reason, a helper’s employment is terminated, she must find another job within two weeks or leave Hong Kong.

Advocates for migrant workers claim this is a form of discrimination, since this rule is not enforced on other foreign workers. Such a limitation, they argue, essentially silences many migrant workers who suffer abuse at the hands of their employers, but are too frightened to come forward because they don’t want to lose their jobs.

Once, during dinner with some family friends, I observed the way a domestic helper is treated in the home. The helper was responsible for taking care of an 8-month old baby in the house. And even though the helper will hold the baby, feed the baby, play with the baby, she is invisible. During dinner, she ate her food in the kitchen while the rest of us ate at a table in the living room.

I suppose, if you’ve hired help, you are paying a domestic helper for a service. You are not paying her to become a part of the family.

But for many families in Hong Kong, I think it’s easy for them to forget that these helpers are human beings.

This is a city where dog strollers are abundant; where volunteers take to the street daily to ask for a donation in the name of animal rights; and where ads in subway stations Photoshop cats and dogs so they are standing upright, and a caption in Chinese reminds us that “animals have rights, too.”

Sure. But what about the rights of domestic helpers? This issue is not in the minds of most Hong Kong people.

In 2008, the Mission For Migrant Workers handled an average of four clients a month who had filed physical or sexual assault complaints with the police.

There aren’t a lot of charities advocating for the rights of these people, but next week, I’ll be visiting Bethune House, a shelter for battered foreign domestic helpers.

Share