"‘It is modern-day slavery’: migrant workers from Indonesia’s East Nusa Tenggara face trafficking, abuse", 17 January 2021

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An estimated 2.7 million Indonesian migrant workers are in Malaysia [...] though only about one-third are documented. [...] [N]ews emerged that an Indonesian domestic worker had been beaten, cut, scalded with hot water and denied food.

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“Every year there are two or three new cases, usually involving more than one domestic helper. Some are underaged, maybe 14 to 16 years old. Their documents have been falsified to make them seem older,” [Antonious Remigius] Abi said. “In all of these cases we find one or a combination of several things. The domestic helpers are overburdened with work and can’t cope, there is psychological abuse, or there is actual physical violence.”

Yet prosecutions remain scarce. If apprehended, local recruiters in NTT often claim they thought they were recruiting for reputable employment agencies. Employment agencies in turn say they recruited the women in good faith and cannot be held responsible for the actions of employers – who deny that any abuse took place, or say they paid their workers’ salaries to the employment agencies. [...]

Dr Maidin Gultom, dean of the law faculty at the Santo Thomas Catholic University, said misinterpretations of the law did not help the situation. “It is human trafficking pure and simple, and the workers do not need to have been taken to a foreign country for that to be the case,” he said, adding that it was rarely viewed this way by the local authorities if domestic workers were employed in other parts of Indonesia.

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A draft bill that would improve workers’ rights, known as the Domestic Workers Bill, has been stalled in Indonesian parliament for almost 15 years.

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