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From Stand in Long Island Slavery Case,
a Snapshot of a Hidden U.S. Problem
By
PAUL VITELLO
CENTRAL
ISLIP, N.Y.,
Nov. 30 — The two tiny Indonesian women know just a handful of
English words. They know Windex. Fantastik (the cleanser, not the
adjective). They know the words Master and Missus, which they were
taught to use in addressing the Long Island couple they served as
live-in help for five years in the sylvan North Shore hamlet of
Muttontown.
Their employers, Varsha Sabhnani, 35, and
her husband, Mahender, 51, naturalized citizens from India, have
been on trial in U.S. District Court here for the past month. They
are charged with what the federal criminal statutes refer to as
involuntary servitude and peonage, or, in the common national
parlance since 1865, the crime of keeping slaves.
The two women, the government charged in its
indictment, were victims of “modern-day slavery.”
It is a rarely prosecuted crime. But since
passage of the 2000 federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act,
prosecutions have increased from less than a handful nationwide per
year to about a dozen. The law is probably best known for its focus
on prostitution and child-sex traffickers; yet in the last few
years, in a few highly publicized cases like the Sabhnanis’, federal
and state task forces set up to deal with sex trafficking have also
begun to focus on the exploitation of domestic workers.
Last year, the wife of a Saudi prince was
convicted in Boston for keeping two house servants for three years
in virtual slavery. In 2005, two doctors in Wisconsin were convicted
of holding a Philippine woman as an indentured servant for 20 years.
Federal prosecutors won convictions in 2003 against a Maryland
couple who kept a Brazilian woman in their home as a servant for 15
years, paying her nothing.
In the Long Island case, prosecutors say the
two Indonesian women were made to sleep in closets of the sprawling,
multimillion-dollar home of their employers. They were forced to
work day and night, threatened, tortured, beaten with rolling pins
and brooms, deprived of adequate food and never allowed out of the
house except to take out the garbage.
The defense lawyers, who are scheduled to
begin their case on Monday, have characterized the two women as
liars, practitioners of witchcraft, and inventors of a false claim
designed to win them fast-track advantages that federal
immigration law grants certain victims of torture and abuse.
Whatever injuries the women may have suffered, the lawyers said,
were self-inflicted in the practice of a traditional Indonesian folk
cure known as kerokan.
Advocacy groups, prosecutors and researchers
who study labor trafficking say domestic workers are as vulnerable
to exploitation as sex workers, and in some ways even harder to
reach.
“The domestic servant cases are often the
most brutal because of the total isolation in which these women are
kept for years and years,” said Cathleen Caron, executive director
of Global Workers Justice Alliance, a New York-based advocacy group
that provides legal help to exploited migrant workers. She has been
watching the Sabhnani case with interest, she said.
The Indonesian women in the Long Island case
are identified by the government only by their first names, Samirah
and Enung. They are 51 and 47 years old, respectively. Each stands
less than five feet tall. In their many hours of translated
testimony and cross-examination so far, halted occasionally by fits
of sobbing, they have told a grim tale at odds with every notion of
modern life in the United States.
The Sabhnanis, who are perfume manufacturers
with relatives and business contacts in
Indonesia, lured them from their jobs and families in Jakarta in
2002 with false promises, they say, and then subjected them to
relentless abuse until Samirah ran away in May.
Regardless of the jury’s verdict, the case
has raised the profile of a population, mostly of women, hidden in
the folds of some very affluent American households, according to
advocates for exploited workers.
Claudia Flores, a staff lawyer for the
American Civil Liberties Union who recently represented three
Indian women kept in involuntary servitude by foreign diplomats in
Washington, said foreign workers unfamiliar with American culture
and language, already vulnerable, are pushed beyond the pale by
isolation.
“Many times, they are forbidden to talk to
people who come into the house,” Ms. Flores said. “If there are two
of them, they are often forbidden to talk to each other. Their phone
calls are monitored. They are not allowed to go anywhere
unaccompanied. We are only seeing the women who are lucky enough and
capable enough to find assistance. What we see is really only the
tip of the iceberg.”
A report released in July by the federal
State Department, “Pursuing a Dream and Finding a Nightmare,” said
the exploitation of women as domestic workers in the United States
and abroad was a crime that has “largely gone unpunished for too
long.”
The report, written by research staff in the
department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons,
underlined the government’s concern for “unskilled women from
developing countries, particularly women working as domestics,” who
it said often “fall victim to conditions of servitude in developed
destination countries, including the United States.”
Jodi Bobb, a
U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman, said the Long Island
slavery case was one of about 100 prosecutions for involuntary
servitude or labor trafficking since passage of the 2000
anti-trafficking law. Not all of them involved domestic workers, she
said, but that number represents a two-fold increase in such
prosecutions compared with the seven years before 2000.
The number of migrant domestic servants
living in involuntary servitude in the United States is a matter for
guessing, but there are some well-informed guesses. The State
Department report estimated that the total number of people
trafficked to the United States annually was 15,000 to 20,000.
The figures do not distinguish between
people trafficked for prostitution or factory, farm or domestic
work. But advocates including Ms. Flores and Ms. Caron, based on
hundreds of cases that filter through their agencies, estimated that
domestic workers accounted for about one-third of the total.
In other words, 5,000 to 7,000 migrant
domestic servants take jobs each year in homes where they are highly
vulnerable to abuse by their employers, they say.
Whether or not they live in conditions as
violent as Samirah and Enung claim to have suffered, almost all are
uneducated women from the world’s poorest countries, according to
the State Department report. Some are children.
They may sign employment contracts promising
wages that seem princely in their home countries — Samirah and Enung
agreed to $100 a month, for instance — but which severely limit
their options here. The temporary visas they obtain with their new
employers’ help usually expire after three to six months, giving
employers ammunition to threaten the servants with certain arrest if
they leave the house.
“Who would do this to another human being?”
said Suzanne Tomatore, director of the Immigrant Women and Children
Project of the New York City Bar Association, which has assisted
dozens of migrant domestic servants. “All kinds of people. Doctors,
lawyers, professionals, business people, diplomats — the only thing
the employers have in common as a group is they all have the
resources to pay someone a fair wage, but they choose not to.”
Ms. Tomatore said prosecutions were
difficult for obvious reasons: language and cultural barriers. Fear.
In many cases, depression. One of her clients, a 24-year-old woman,
had been a domestic servant in one household since she was 6. “She
had never been to school,” said Ms. Tomatore, who would not identify
the woman or the employers except to say they were diplomats from an
African nation who have since left. The woman was given permanent
legal immigration status. She works in an office.
During the Long Island trial, sobbing
sometimes overtook Samirah as she described the tortures she was
subjected to — being forced to run up and down stairs until
exhausted, to eat whole hot chili peppers, to stand still while “the
Missus” scalded her with boiling hot water. Sometimes the sobbing
overtook Enung, who described being forced to help perform some of
those tortures on Samirah.
The case is unusual, advocates say, because
there were other witnesses to corroborate some of the women’s
claims. Among them was a woman who worked for Mr. Sabhnani’s perfume
company, which is based in an office attached to the Muttontown
house. She said she was shocked one day to see Samirah crawling up
the basement stairs, bleeding from the forehead. The woman testified
that Samirah and Enung told her that Mrs. Sabhnani had beaten her.
A landscape contractor testified that Enung
approached him furtively one morning, raggedly dressed, pointing to
her stomach and uttering one of her few English words: “Doughnut,”
he recalled her saying. “Doughnut.” He gave her the half-dozen
doughnuts he had in his truck.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she cried
as she ran back toward the big house, he said.
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