Slavery+in+Indonesia

Child domestic workers are persons under 18 years of age who work in other people’s households (and sometimes their own families’) doing domestic chores, caring for children, running errands and helping their employers run small businesses. Child domestic workers include those who ‘live in’ and those who live separately from their employers. Hundreds of thousands of child workers are being exploited, sexually abused, and overworked. Many Indonesians have live-in maids who cook and clean, most of child slaves are underage girls, some as young as the age of 11. They worked 18-hour, sexual abuse by their employers, and conditions tantamount to slavery as they were forced to work for free. Some were not even allowed to rest fort a little bit. They would abuse the children physically if they did not do the job properly. Domestic workers have no rights to their own. The children live in a den or a squalid shed, with no prospects and no pay. Many are beaten with sticks and iron rods and not even allowed to see their parents. They are branded with red hot irons, burnt with cigarettes, starved, whipped, beaten while hanging upside down, chained up, abused in an intimate way, and kept locked in cupboards for days on end. Parents have sold an estimated 15 million children into bonded labor in return for meagre loans from moneylenders.Children enter domestic work for a variety of reasons. Poverty and promise of a better future sometimes lead parents to send their children into domestic work or children to decide to enter it of their own accord. Parents send their children to work with a rich family thinking that it will bring them new opportunities. Sometimes referred to as bonded laborers (because of the debts owed their masters). Slaves differ from actual workers because they are actually held in physical bondage (they are shackled, held at gunpoint, etc.).

