The life of domestic workers amid sexual abuse by employers
It’s mid-morning on a Tuesday. I am seated on an orange linen couch in a safe house in Kiambu County. I cannot identify the shelter as I need to protect the survivors under their care.
Esla (name changed to protect her identity) walks past and sits on a one-seater sofa to my left. She is dressed in an ankle length denim and grey floral sweater.
I give her a warm smile and say hello, to which she responds and moves closer to me. She stares at my watch, and confesses that she likes it. The admiration extends to my phone before she asks me to get her a job as a domestic worker.
Contrastingly, I am here to interview her on sexual abuse she suffered in the hands of her previous employer while serving in the same capacity in a household in Karen, Nairobi County.
Africa Labour, Research and Education Institute and Wage Indicator Foundation estimates that there are about two million domestic workers in Kenya. The number is approximated to have grown, with the job cuts that came with the Covid-19 pandemic.
But even as the numbers grow, the risk of being sexually abused by their employers is a danger that dishearteningly underlies their work.
Gated Community
SweepSouth, a South African on-demand home services provider carried a survey on 600 Kenyan domestic workers who worked between May 2020 and May 2021. Ninety per cent of the 600 responded including 31 per cent who were male. The study found 16 per cent of the workers had faced sexual abuse at their workplace.
Based on calculation, it implies 86 out of the 540 who responded had been abused.
In retrospect, this would mean in a gated community of 86 households, a domestic worker employed in each of them had suffered the criminal offence.
Most domestic workers who are survivors of domestic violence, are however, threatened to silence. Often, employers take advantage of their vulnerabilities; some are partially or totally orphaned and are desperate not to lose their source of income. Others come from extremely poor or dysfunctional families and have no one to turn to.
Their wages are also low. SweepSouth found a domestic worker earns an average of a monthly wage of Sh8,522, an equivalent of a bedsitter rent in Buruburu, Nairobi County.
Pursuit for justice then becomes a tall order considering gender-based violence (GBV) cases take more than a year to resolve in courts. The financial resources needed to seek not only legal services but also psychosocial and medical support, also amount to Sh24,797 annually, as per the calculations of National Gender and Equality Commission.
Household Pets
International Labour Organisation describes a domestic worker as one who performs work in or for a private household including tasks such as cleaning the house, cooking, washing and ironing clothes, taking care of children, or elderly or sick members of a family. They also include those who do gardening, guarding the house, driving for the family, and even taking care of household pets.
Kenya is an attractive market for domestic workers from Uganda, Sudan, Tanzania and Rwanda. And it is not just the Kenyan employers who perpetrate the sexual violence, foreign employers in Kenya, are also perpetrators of this criminal offence.
For close to 20 minutes, Esla and I converse on the things she likes and what she plans to do with her life in the future. I discreetly shift her to the main agenda of the interview with a question “where have you worked before?”
