VAVUNIYA, SRI LANKA — In less than 24 hours, Rohini Selvaruban would leave her country for the first time. Her recruiter had called that morning in September 2022 to say her flight was booked. She didn’t complain about the short notice; this was her family’s one chance to escape poverty.
She packed three pairs of jeans, T-shirts, a comfortable dress, some underwear and toiletries. She had 50,000 Sri Lankan rupees (168 United States dollars), borrowed from her sister, in her purse. The next morning, a recruiter put her on a flight to Oman, a wealthy Gulf nation where Sri Lankan women often migrate to work as maids.
The International Labour Organization estimates that 2.1 million migrants work as domestic laborers across the Middle East. Human rights organizations say labor laws in the region — and especially in Oman, which is known for lax labor laws that are not enforced consistently — make domestic workers vulnerable to human trafficking and exploitation.
This is the story of how Selvaruban and other women were recruited by traffickers with false promises of well-paying and desirable jobs, and how they got away.
Some 70,989 women left Sri Lanka legally in 2022 to work as maids in Gulf countries, according to data from the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment. But many more, like Selvaruban, were trafficked — recruited through deception and held captive — and not included in the official count. Trafficking of women laborers from Sri Lanka has surpassed pre-pandemic levels, according to the Recovery and Humanitarian Action Management Agency (RAHAMA), a Vavuniya-based anti-trafficking nonprofit organization. Rising prices and high unemployment in Sri Lanka due to an economic crisis are driving women to sign up for domestic work in the Gulf, says Sivalingam Krishnakumar, district development officer of foreign employment at the Vavuniya District Secretariat.
Since 2022, 117 families have approached the nonprofit organization to help them or their family members after they experienced human trafficking. The Sri Lankan government says in 2022 it repatriated 72 people who had been trafficked. In November 2022, the Sri Lankan Embassy in Oman said 330 women had requested to be returned home. The Embassy stated that it was receiving “an increasing number of complaints daily” from domestic workers who face “tremendous difficulties including various harassment.”
“Human trafficking has increased because it is easier to go abroad illegally through agents,” says Mohamed Faleel Marikkar, secretary general of RAHAMA. “Women do not choose the right routes to go abroad and are left in limbo, forcing their families to sell assets and go into debt.”
Global Press Journal spoke to several women who undertook this journey, including Selvaruban. They recounted being held captive, having their passports confiscated, eating one meal a day, being housed in a dormitory where more than 40 women shared one bathroom, being beaten and not paid wages, which eventually caused their families to fall into debt.
Tharaka Balasuriya, Sri Lanka’s foreign affairs minister, says the foreign employment bureau is creating “awareness” among women about illegal employment.
“Many times, due to unscrupulous agents and advertisements in Facebook and social media, people are misled into going overseas through irregular channels,” he says, adding that the government will look after “the interests” of all Sri Lankans, including those employed illegally abroad.
Recruitment
When Sri Lanka’s economy collapsed in early 2021, it felt unbearable for many in the Northern Province, which comprises Vavuniya, Mannar, Mullaitivu, Kilinochchi and Jaffna.
Selvaruban’s family was struggling. Her husband was often in the hospital due to a kidney disease and could not work. Selvaruban, then 29, would pick groundnuts and pull out weeds for farmers, earning 1,000 rupees (3 dollars) a day. But finding employment was, as a Tamil saying goes, as rare as a horse with horns. Her girls often went hungry, and their unplastered and mostly unfurnished home leaked when it rained.
Looking for a way out, Selvaruban approached a recruiter — known locally as an “agent” — to get her a well-paying job abroad. She recalls him telling her that it would be legal, and they would register her with the foreign employment bureau. She would be paid 100,000 rupees (337 dollars) per month — a high salary for a maid in Sri Lanka.
“The family you will be working for will pick you up,” she recalls the recruiter telling her. “They will give you everything, including clothes, and take good care of you. If you have any problem, we will take care of it.”
She began dreaming. She would save money and send it home. Her girls would eat proper meals. Her family would be saved.
Sri Lanka has a long history of exporting cheap labor to the world. Labor accounted for 8% of Sri Lanka’s gross domestic product between 2014 and 2020. The Central Bank of Sri Lanka notes that worker remittances have covered 80% of the nation’s trade deficit over two decades, calling it a “key pillar” of the nation’s resilience. In June 2023 alone, migrant workers sent home 475.7 million dollars.
One in 5 registered migrants in 2022 worked as domestic help, according to the foreign employment bureau. They went legally, with a work visa and after registering with the foreign employment bureau.
But rather than use the formal migration system, many women in Sri Lanka instead find a recruiter who promises an easy route, says Marikkar, of RAHAMA. They are in danger of being trafficked.
Their experiences are mostly undocumented. But data suggests that even legal domestic workers in foreign countries can face exploitation. In 2022, Sri Lanka’s foreign employment bureau received 578 complaints from legal domestic laborers about harassment, being overworked or premature termination.
The US Department of State’s 2023 human trafficking report states that migrant domestic workers in Oman experienced “non-payment of wages; restriction of movement; physical, verbal, and sexual abuse; contract switching; excessive work hours; denial of medical care, food, and rest days; passport confiscation; and threats of use of force, arrest and detention by police — all trafficking indicators — at the hands of their employers.”
The report also notes, “Despite these trafficking indicators, the government did not report criminally investigating the majority of these cases.”
Oman’s National Committee to Combat Human Trafficking told Global Press Journal in an email that since October 2023, it has not allowed workers to convert visitor visas into work visas within Oman in order to prevent labor trafficking. The country is also monitoring recruiters, and in 2023, the Omani authorities referred 424 such agencies for prosecution, it said, adding that some of the responsibility for curbing recruiting agencies lies with countries of origin. “The Sultanate of Oman investigates all allegations of human trafficking,” the Committee stated.
The Embassy of the Sultanate of Oman in Colombo stated that they “acknowledge the gravity of this situation, where vulnerable individuals endure exploitation and abuse.”
Trials abroad
When Selvaruban’s plane landed in Oman, traffickers drove her and four women to the city of Sohar, she recalls. They confiscated the women’s passports and showed them to a dormitory. It had a small window, an attached bathroom, and already housed 45 women from Nepal, India, Sri Lanka and other countries, Selvaruban says. They were fed rice and green peas once a day.
“We spread newspapers on the floor and lay close together,” she says. “We would wait in a line to use the shower and toilet.”
Some women told Selvaruban they had been there for six months. Others lamented their decision to leave Sri Lanka. Selvaruban remembered her daughters and cried.
“I felt like I had died,” she recalls.
The agency set a fee for her of 200,000 rupees (673 dollars), she says. She was hired 20 days later by a family of three — but Selvaruban says she was fired quickly when they found out she practiced a different religion.
Fifteen days later, she joined a family whose 5-year-old girl took to punching and physically abusing her, she says. After the girl threw water and a floor cleaning chemical on Selvaruban’s head, she quit and returned to the agency.
The Omani recruiter on shift got livid and punched and slapped Selvaruban, she says. The woman grabbed her long hair, a matter of pride for Tamil women, and chopped it off, she says.
“Just looking at her made me shiver. She was an evil demon,” Selvaruban recalls. For the next month, Selvaruban was made to work for the recruiter’s family without pay, she says. Then she was taken to Dubai, where she stayed in a dorm for 20 days without being hired.
Trapped in debt
Other women recounted similar experiences. In 2022, Nadarajkanna, who wants to be identified only by her last name for fear of stigma, worked in a garment factory in Vavuniya for 60,000 rupees (202 dollars) per month. But it was not enough, as her family was 700,000 rupees (2,357 dollars) in debt.
She approached a local recruiter and asked to go to Dubai. But at the airport, she says, the recruiter said they would go instead to Oman on visitor visas.
Nadarajkanna says she was hired by an Omani woman for 500 Omani rials (1,300 dollars). She babysat, cooked, washed dishes and cleaned the house, staying up till 3 a.m., she recalls. At the end of the month, she was paid the same amount she was earning back home.
She quit and was sent back to the recruiter’s office, where the agent on duty threatened her, she says.
“It is a loss for me that I paid 1.5 million rupees to bring you to Oman,” she remembers the man saying. “If you want to go back to the country, you must pay back 600,000 rupees. Or else I’ll sell you to a brothel.”
Her husband borrowed the money and paid the local recruiter in Vavuniya. She returned home in January 2023 and is now back at the garment factory and doing odd jobs on a farm. Her family’s debt has ballooned to 1.3 million rupees (4,377 dollars) because of her migration, she says.
“I will never go to work abroad again,” she adds.
Authorized migration
Of the women Global Press Journal spoke to, Mohanraj, who also wants to be identified only by her last name for fear of stigma, was the only one who traveled abroad legally. But she, too, recounted a difficult stay abroad, though unlike the others, she could turn to the Sri Lankan Embassy for help.
Mohanraj requested to go to Kuwait, but in April 2022, the recruiter sent her to Oman instead. She says that after six employers either exploited her or didn’t pay wages, she took refuge in a safe house run by the Sri Lankan Embassy in Muscat, the Omani capital, in February last year. Safe houses are meant to shelter registered women migrants; women who migrate illegally cannot access them.
Mohanraj says the safe house in Oman was dismal, without sufficient groceries to cook meals. The embassy appeared to have no plan to send her home, she says. After three months of waiting, she joined some women from the safe house who were protesting outside the embassy, demanding to be repatriated.
The Omani police arrested the protesters. Mohanraj says she stayed in detention until July, when the Omani government deported her to Sri Lanka.
Foreign affairs minister Balasuriya says that the Sri Lankan ambassador in Oman was “constantly in touch” with Omani officials about the arrested women. “But it does not mean that they will bend their rules for us,” he says, adding that the ambassador managed to get fines waived.
Balasuriya says the embassy does not have funds to fly back all women who migrate illegally, and that easy repatriation can increase illegal migration and trafficking.
“People will think that if they go to a country illegally, there is some kind of a blanket insurance that the government will get them from that country to Sri Lanka free,” he says.
RAHAMA has formed 198 anti-trafficking groups, including government officials, members of community organizations and women exploited abroad, to educate people in Vavuniya and Mullaitivu districts. This, Marikkar says, is an attempt to reduce human trafficking.
But people don’t seem to understand the dangers and still risk going through recruiters due to economic troubles, says Krishnakumar of the Vavuniya District Secretariat.
“People don’t have time to think calmly,” he says. “They are forced to go abroad and get a job quickly because there are no jobs locally.”
Return home
Selvaruban’s family fought hard to bring her home. Her sisters and mother approached the local police in Cheddikulam. The police summoned the recruiter and asked Selvaruban’s family to pay him for a flight home, she says.
An official at the Cheddikulam police, who requested anonymity as he is not authorized to speak to the press, says it can be challenging to handle such cases, where there is usually no proof of wrongdoing.
Selvaruban’s husband borrowed 160,000 rupees (539 dollars) from local moneylenders to pay the recruiter, increasing their total debt to 530,000 rupees (1,784 dollars).
And three months after her first journey abroad, Selvaruban returned home.
“I was relieved,” she says, “to be back alive, and happy to be with my family.”