CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Fri Apr 30, 2021 1:46 am Sometimes the choice is not as obvious as it might seem.

Who Owns Women’s Bodies?
The subjugation of women is a global problem that extends far beyond domestic work in Asia.
Karen Coates Apr 29, 2021

I keep a small rock on my desktop. It’s shaped like a turtle, but its edges are sharp and jagged, and it could easily break the skin. It reminds me of the day I met a young woman in a bright pink shirt who told me about her escape from slavery.

This was several years ago, in Cambodia. My friend Sinith, a photographer, drove us into the countryside a few hours from Phnom Penh. He wanted to stop at the base of a mountain, where workers were paid to smash big rocks into small stones. Construction requires sand and gravel, and it’s mined by hand from local mountains like this. Men wielded sledgehammers high above their heads, smacking giant boulders. Women loaded the smaller rocks into rattan baskets, which they carried to nearby trucks for transport up and down the Mekong River. Entire families spent their days among these stones; those too young or old or weak to work sat on the outskirts, caring for babies and toddlers.

I don’t know the name of the young woman in the bright pink shirt, but we talked for some time. She told me she had just returned from Malaysia, where she had worked as a maid for an older couple who had hired her under the guise of a two-year contract. When I asked whether it was a good job, she stared silently for a moment then said, “No. No sleep. I worked 24 hours.” She could never rest or take a day off—and she was afraid for her physical safety. So, somehow, she escaped. She abandoned her hopes in Malaysia and returned to this mountain where, every day, men earned $10 for cracking stone, and women earned $3 for carrying it away.

I know no further details of what the young woman endured. I hadn’t gone to the mountain expecting to hear a story of enslavement—yet it hadn’t surprised me either. Her words mirrored the accounts of women across Southeast Asia who are trapped in “jobs” as “maids” for upper-class families who treat their bodies as domestic tools. Google any combination of “Southeast Asia” “maid” “abuse” “murder” and/or “rape,” and a jaw-dropping archive of criminal cases appears.

And yet, reports show that many young women from Asia’s poorest communities continue to pursue jobs as housemaids because they have no choice—they need to send money to their families back home. It’s a system frequently described as modern-day slavery.
https://www.damemagazine.com/2021/04/29 ... ns-bodies/