One of the most neglected social problems of our society is the inhuman treatment meted out to domestic servants. In many cases, they are treated shabbily by the household owners who employ them.
In one recent incident of domestic violence, a teenage servant was subjected to torture to death by his landlord lady in Karachi.
It emerged that a woman in Karachi’s Bahadurabad went disappeared after leaving the servant to the hospital in an unconscious condition, who later died due to his wounds.
The police arrested the woman and her son after detecting their location via their vehicle in which they brought the servant to the hospital.
A noticeable upsurge occurred in the abusive treatment of domestic assistants in the last few years.
Maids work in rich households only to earn for their families. It’s their compulsion to work in homes where comfort-loving corpulent begums sit back and lord over them.
The huge class disparity between the rich and the poor has created a large segment of about 12 million child workers in the country. Don’t these unfortunate child workers, housemaids in this case, deserve our sympathy? Both couples accused of killing and torturing housemaids might well have children of their own of the same age group.
It’s often reported that domestic maids are subjected to physical abuse of licentious nature by the household owners. If the helpless maids approach the police, they stand little or no chance of impartial inquiry or sympathetic hearing against the influential reprobates.
In our case, domestic maids are usually accused of pilferage and theft. If it involves theft of some expensive items or jewellery, the maids are handed over to the police who employ their own methods to extract confessions. In such situations, the rich homeowners should be generous and forgiving. As humans, even the poor long to possess worldly materials found in abundance in the homes of the rich. If the poor err, be compassionate and overlook, because poverty itself is great affliction.
There are rules in the country against domestic violence on the servants, but all the governments need to ensure the implementation on them so that house servants also can be given justice and a life as a human.
