“We Are Everywhere, But Invisible”: How One System Facilitates Sexualized Violence and Protects its Perpetrators
Editor’s Note: Survivors who spoke to The Public Source requested anonymity, fearing repercussions or retaliation; their names have been changed. Interviews were conducted in Arabic and/or French and their translation to English has been slightly edited for clarity.
Content warning: This article contains descriptions of gender-based harassment and assault.
Even now, Ayana still can’t open any of the doors in her house with her hands. Years ago, Ayana lived in a building where the property manager would routinely let himself into her home without permission and sexually harass her and her roommates. She became revolted by the thought of touching anything he may have put his hands on.
When I meet her in November 2022, Ayana is guarded at first. Her eyes are dark and expressive, but so tired that I can’t believe she is only 31. We sit at a picnic table in the garden of Dammeh, a co-operative for women, trans, and gender non-conforming people. She sits next to me on the bench, stiffly facing forward, away from me. She’s wearing a hoodie and leggings, her hair in a bun, and she has her hood up in what feels like a protective manner. She doesn’t trust me, and doesn’t try to hide it. And I don’t blame her. Her manner of speaking is angry, defensive almost; every so often, she punctuates her sentence with an angry shrug and a dismissive flap of her hand, as though brushing off the idea of anyone caring about her.
As we talk, her eyes soften. Her hood comes down. By the end of our conversation, she sits facing me. She still looks tired, but she smiles as she talks.
Ayana left Ethiopia 15 years ago and has been in Lebanon ever since. At one point, she lived in a little apartment with her sister and a few roommates. The property manager had drilled peepholes into the walls and installed windows in some of the bathrooms with views of the toilet or shower. He placed angled mirrors in the kitchen so he could watch them as they worked. Their entire home was a trap.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, he had keys and saw that as an invitation to walk into the house whenever he pleased, without their permission. He would leer at them and sometimes openly masturbate. When Ayana would go to a bathroom where he couldn’t watch her, and close the door behind her, he would curse at her. Ayana eventually started shouting back at him, and he became more cautious around her.
The other women would try to ignore him, but all they could do was pretend he wasn’t there. Affordable rent, let alone a place to live independently, outside the control of a sponsor or employer, is a rarity for migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. So they learned to make themselves invisible. “They stayed silent and got used to it,” Ayana says. “They were afraid to do anything about it.”
Ever since then, Ayana has been hypervigilant. She lives alone in a safe place now, but “paranoia,” as she calls it, is a lasting effect of trauma. No matter where she is, she finds herself scanning the walls for drilled peepholes and suspiciously placed mirrors. She isn’t comfortable around men, and still expects any who come near her to try something. She still uses her feet to push doors open. The past is lodged in her body and it haunts her to this day.
“I don’t feel like I can trust anyone again,” she tells The Public Source, flinching as she recalls her ordeal. “Even if I were to marry, I’m afraid this will happen to me again.”
Everywhere, but Invisible
Ayana’s story is all too common — one in four women in Lebanon have faced gender-based violence. But perpetrators disproportionately target migrant domestic workers, who are especially vulnerable in the country. They live at the heart of overlapping systems of oppression: the system that governs their work — a legal framework known as Kafala, Arabic for sponsorship — forces them into poverty. The Labor Ministry excludes them from legal security and labor protections. And many people in Lebanon — from your local dekkanji to people in public office — direct sexist and racist aggression toward them.
Migrant domestic workers are physically present everywhere across Lebanon, but intentionally hidden away, Ayana says. She doesn’t feel like they are a priority, consideration, or even an afterthought, to anyone. “We are everywhere — in people’s homes, in the mouths of human rights organizations, etc. — but we’re invisible,” she says. “We are present when we are ‘needed’ and exploited, but we are invisible when it comes to abuse, the right to rent, and rights in general; we are subject to everyone’s whims. Why are we not viewed as human beings?”
Lebanon is home to an estimated 250,000 migrant domestic workers, the vast majority of them women. Over two thirds of them have experienced some form of sexual violence at least once during their time in the country, according to a groundbreaking study released in 2022.
Egna Legna Besidet, a community-run organization founded by and for migrant domestic workers, has been documenting sexual violence since it was established in 2017. In 2021, Egna Legna teamed up with the Lebanese American University’s (LAU) Institute for Migration Studies to carry out the largest study to date on sexualized violence against migrant domestic workers.
The research team spent months conducting in-depth interviews with 913 migrant women between the ages of 18 and 61 who did domestic labor. They conducted their research over 2021 and 2022, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Beirut port explosion, and Lebanon’s historic economic crisis.
Live-in migrant domestic workers were already living in lockdown, even under “normal” circumstances. Life-threatening violence in captivity was already their daily reality: their employers already had free rein to limit and control their basic freedoms, such as who they talk to, whether they can leave the house and when, where they go, whether they can access the internet, when they can sleep, and whether they can lock their own bedroom doors.
But gender-based violence increased significantly worldwide during lockdowns, a phenomenon called the “shadow pandemic” by UN Women. And the situation was particularly dire in Lebanon. During the year of lockdowns starting in March 2020, calls to domestic violence helplines increased by 96.5 percent.
Under pandemic-era lockdowns, employers more severely restricted and exploited migrant domestic workers, exposing them to life-threatening violence throughout the day. Live-in workers labored around the clock, without even the respite of their employers going to work; and their employers, who were now at home during the day, imposed their moods, whims, and unwanted sexual advances on them.
One in four women in Lebanon have faced gender-based violence. But perpetrators disproportionately target migrant domestic workers, who are especially vulnerable in the country.
The overwhelming majority of the migrant workers who reported sexual violence inside the home — 70 percent — confirmed that male employers carried out the abuse. Many of the women were subjected to abuse from multiple perpetrators: another 40 percent reported abuse by relatives and friends of the employers, while 25-30 percent endured abuse from female employers.
The report also shows that sexualized violence toward migrant women happens everywhere: outside the home, 65 percent reported experiencing harassment by taxi drivers, and 15 percent reported harassment by police officers.
A staggering 68 percent of the 913 women that Egna Legna interviewed reported surviving at least one instance of sexualized violence. But that number only reflects the women who felt comfortable sharing their experience: even with sympathetic interviewers, not all women who have survived gender-based violence are ready to talk about it.
Speaking about their experience to anyone could also strip them of what little privilege they possess.
Ariane Kitoko, a member of the Egna Legna Besidet research team, said that most women choose to keep quiet so as not to lose rights that are considered privileges under Kafala, such as a day off. Of the 65 percent who reported experiencing harassment by taxi drivers, she said, many of the women would not mention that experience to their employers, because they did not want to risk losing their one day off.
Abusers feel enabled to act with impunity against women like Ayana because the structures and institutions of Lebanese society — Kafala as well as all of the legal, criminal, and workplace systems around it that govern migrant workers’ lives — are set up to ignore and dismiss the crimes perpetrated against them, creating an impossible situation; they have to become invisible in order to survive.
“Between freedom and sexual violence, they choose sexual violence,” said the researcher from Egna Legna, which means “from us migrants to ourselves” in Amharic. “Imagine having to choose between the two!”
Kafala: Lebanon’s ‘Third Pillar’ of Economic Exploitation
Lebanon’s Kafala industry generates at least $100 million annually. Anthropologist Sumayya Kassamali dubs the industry the “third pillar” of Lebanon’s neoliberal political economy, alongside banking and real estate.
Migrant domestic workers are filling an essential need in Lebanon by providing undervalued and un(der)paid labor in Lebanese society, where the post-civil war era has been marked by the solidification of a society and economy of non-productivity, heavily reliant on outsourcing and importing.
Kafala relies on migrant workers to do indispensable work for lower wages than the local population would accept, and keeps them in a state of precarity, both financially and immigration status-wise, to ensure they cannot rebel against their exploitation.
Kassamali ties this post-war “excessive non-productive wealth” and society’s devaluation of housework with excessive domestic abuse and society’s legitimization of the “home-as-workplace as a site of violence and hatred.” These two practices were connected when the state and society established the norms of Kafala after the war, and were integral to the transformation of Lebanon into an economy that devalues productive sectors (agriculture, industry) and instead values greed and the dominance of an oligarchic elite.
A staggering 68 percent of the 913 women that Egna Legna interviewed reported surviving at least one instance of sexualized violence.
“The Kafala system is an economy. And when it becomes an economy, the individual is consumed by these factors that do not care about the human,” Kitoko tells The Public Source. “It generates money for the people or the cartels that are within the system, and it generates money for the country of origin because they are sending remittances. The only victims are the women.”
Recruitment agencies are the biggest profiteers. In 2019, agencies alone generated $57.5 million, making up 60 percent of the industry’s total revenues. That same year, Lebanon’s General Security made $6.6 million from new residency permits and $29.9 million from renewals, while the Labor Ministry made $5.3 million from labor permits.
But the $100 million does not account for any of the virtually unpaid labor put in by migrant domestic workers to keep the country afloat: taking care of their employers’ homes, children, and aging parents so that the employers can go to work. Nor does it account for the money that recruitment agencies, the state, and households “save” or gain in profits by hiring migrant workers in the first place.
Meanwhile, in 2019, the workers themselves were earning $230 on average per month — if they were paid at all.
Perpetrators of sexual violence against migrant domestic workers are protected and enabled by the Kafala system, Kitoko says.
“It's also this perception of being non-Lebanese — of being the ‘other.’ It's normalized in Lebanese society; there is zero respect for the ‘other,’” she tells The Public Source. “It's a societal issue. And it has to stop. And accountability is part of that, it's very important.”
The Lebanese justice system has historically been unwilling to challenge profit-driven interests and protect migrant domestic workers, whose precarious legal status in the country lies at the intersection of the sexist, racist, class structure and exploitation at the heart of Kafala.
In September 2020, caretaker labor minister, Lamia Yammine, proposed a new unified standard contract for migrant domestic workers, selling it as a solution to “end Kafala.” Far from adequate, the draft contract would have granted migrant workers the national minimum wage, a 48-hour workweek, a minimum of one day off a week, and overtime pay — on paper, and on paper alone.
Sponsors are already notorious for not adhering to the contracts currently in place for migrant domestic workers.
Even these meager “reforms” couldn’t see the light of day. The Syndicate of Owners of Recruitment Agencies in Lebanon (SORAL) — the association for owners of the “recruitment offices” that bring migrant workers into Lebanon, sometimes under false pretenses, and profit from their exploitation — challenged this legislation. In September 2020, it filed a lawsuit with the State Shura Council, Lebanon’s high administrative court.
SORAL claimed that the legislation would harm their industry and breach the country’s Labor Law, which explicitly excludes migrant workers, and doesn’t guarantee them a minimum wage or the right to form a union.
The Shura Council granted SORAL’s appeal and temporarily suspended the new unified contract. The Council’s only justification for its decision was a laconic clause noting that the suggested new contract “might cause serious harm to the plaintiff.”
Recruitment agencies are the biggest profiteers under Kafala. In 2019, agencies alone generated $57.5 million, making up 60 percent of the industry’s total revenues. That same year, Lebanon’s General Security made $6.6 million from new residency permits and $29.9 million from renewals, while the Labor Ministry made $5.3 million from labor permits.
“As SORAL’s successful lobbying has proven, those with financial stakes in Kafala are likely to oppose every step on the road to ending the current abusive system,” Triangle Research, a Beirut-based research institute, pointed out.
The head of SORAL, Joseph Saliba, rejected the findings of the Egna Legna Besidet-LAU study when it first came out, casting aspersions on migrant domestic workers who anonymously responded to the survey.
“We must know who participated in the study, because if they are workers who are in violation of the residency law, it is only natural for them to claim that they have been subjected to harassment, or other things like beatings or food deprivation,” Saliba told Al-Hurra, echoing the deflecting, victim-blaming narrative familiar to those few survivors who have dared to speak up about what they went through.
“They Will Sacrifice You”
Helene, 37, who hails from Cameroon, has managed to narrowly escape every abusive work environment she has found herself in. She would make it out of one, only to find herself in another. This kind of serial victimization is quasi-inevitable under Kafala, where the judicial and labor systems are set up to ignore and dismiss migrant workers, and provide no recourse in cases where their workplace is abusive.
Helene describes a workplace that particularly marked her: a household where her sponsor was a woman. The sponsor’s adult son would come into Helene’s room at night and touch her without her consent. When that became a pattern, Helene told her sponsor, in hopes she could put an end to her son’s assaults. Instead, Helene was forbidden from locking her bedroom door; despite knowing that her son was assaulting Helene, her sponsor would aggressively accuse her of only locking her door so she could leave the house in the middle of the night unnoticed.
Helene had expected her former employer, a woman like herself, would protect her. Instead, her sponsor made a clear choice: she pretended not to notice what her son was doing, and covered up his assaults in order to preserve the family’s reputation. “All of them know what is going on in their own house,” she told The Public Source.
“Even if you raise up your voice, they will sacrifice you,” Helene says. “No one can erase what they did to me. No one can clean it up like nothing ever happened.”
Anthropologist Sumayya Kassamali ties post-war “excessive non-productive wealth” and society’s devaluation of housework with excessive domestic abuse and society’s legitimization of the “home-as-workplace as a site of violence and hatred.”
Helene ran away from this house without her documents, including her passport, which were held by her sponsor, as is customary under the sponsorship system.
Anyone, individual or organization, who tries to fight against the sexual abuse of migrant domestic workers in one way or another has to be very familiar with how the Kafala system is built to enable discrimination against migrant domestic workers and prevent workers from reporting their experiences.
The process of renewing residency documents begins at the recruitment agency, which must contact the previous sponsor to convince them to cooperate in the renewal process. At that critical point, recruitment agencies and sponsors have the power to begin the deportation process if they so wish — even if the sponsor is at fault.
It took Helene six years to get her abusive former sponsor to give her documents back. The woman even demanded that Helene give her money in exchange for her passport, and filed a complaint to the police about Helene leaving the household.
Eventually, the former sponsor agreed to give Helene her passport back. But when they went to the police station to retract the complaint, Helene’s former employer claimed Helene had stolen from them and ran away — a common lie used by employers under Kafala, usually to evade their responsibilities, but oftentimes to exact revenge against migrant workers who leave them.
While Helene finally had her passport back, her former sponsor held onto her old residency permit, which is necessary for migrant workers to renew their residency in Lebanon.
“Even if you raise up your voice, they will sacrifice you. No one can erase what they did to me. No one can clean it up like nothing ever happened.” —Helene, migrant domestic worker and survivor
Helene therefore spent two more years trying to get a new residency permit. In the process, she contacted a lawyer through an NGO (which she declined to name), to whom she gave $1,500 to handle her case. She tells The Public Source that the lawyer did nothing with her money or her case, and threatened to expose her when she followed up.
Ayana had a similar experience. A former sponsor held onto her documents and passport for 14 years, forcing her to spend a lot of money and time to get her paperwork in order. This caused her a lot of stress and depression, she says.
“They Should Listen To Us”: Police Inaction as Complicity
Most migrant domestic workers in Lebanon do not have many avenues for justice. In theory, the police is supposed to be one of them — but in reality, the criminal justice system does not work in migrant workers’ favor, so this is not a viable option.
The Lebanese parliament passed Law No. 205/2020 criminalizing sexual harassment in December 2020. Law No. 205/2020 defines sexual harassment as “any bad and repetitive behavior that is extraordinary, unwelcome by the victim, and with sexual connotation that constitutes a violation of the body, privacy, or emotions.” The law notes that sexual harassment can occur through speech, actions, and electronic means. The law also considers single or repeated acts that use, “psychological, moral, financial, or racist pressure to obtain benefits of sexual nature” as sexual harassment.
Karim Nammour, a legal expert with Legal Agenda, tells The Public Source that in theory, the law applies to everyone in the country, including migrants. But in practice, justice through this route is difficult for anyone to access, let alone marginalized groups. In his experience, people who are able to access justice in the end are usually “empowered” or privileged in one way or another, or psychologically and materially capable.
All survivors face major obstacles in the initial steps of the reporting process: overcoming the fear of coming to a police station; being taken seriously by the officers receiving the complaint; and, finally, reporting the act of sexual violence they’ve experienced.
Women who are also migrant domestic workers face additional social barriers when reporting sexual violence.
Nammour says Law No. 205/2020 is a criminal law, which means it should apply to everyone living in Lebanon — including non-Lebanese people. “This law, which aims to protect the most marginalized, doesn't take marginalization into consideration at all, which makes it a very theoretical law,” Nammour tells The Public Source.
Serial victimization is quasi-inevitable under Kafala, where the judicial and labor systems are set up to ignore and dismiss migrant workers, and provide no recourse in cases where their workplace is abusive.
Mohana Ishak, head of Legal Affairs and Advocacy at KAFA’s Anti-Trafficking Unit, explains that sponsors tend to confiscate migrant workers’ documentation — a common practice protected under the Kafala system. In these cases, when a worker flees an abusive environment, they are forced to leave their IDs and residence documents behind as they are usually held by the sponsor. Undocumented, these migrant workers are at higher risk of being “caught” and imprisoned or deported.
Migrant workers are often locked indoors with little connection to the outside world, so they may not be familiar with the neighborhood where they live and work. Ishak explains that in these cases, if they manage to escape an abusive household, they most likely won’t know their way around and are unable to find their way to a police station.
Language and racism are also obstacles, Ishak says. When they come to Lebanon to work, migrant workers may not always speak Arabic, and police officers use that language barrier as an excuse not to make the effort to fully understand or believe them when reporting abuse to police officers.
When Helene went to the police in an attempt to report the abuse committed by her sponsor’s son and get help, she says police officers did not take her seriously, minimizing and dismissing her experiences.
“You get no help. The police just want to keep you silent,” she tells The Public Source. “They should treat us like people. They should listen to us!”
When migrant domestic workers do go to the police to report sexual violence, the first thing they are asked for is their papers, according to the Egna Legna Besidet-LAU study. If their sponsor is holding their passport or residency permit hostage, police can either detain them or begin the deportation process — further encouraging a culture of silence and impunity.
“The police station and the tribunal, for various marginalized groups including migrant domestic workers, represent the violence of the state upon them, upon their bodies, rather than the state vehicle that will actually get them their rights,” Nammour says.
“You get no help. The police just want to keep you silent. They should treat us like people. They should listen to us!” —Helene, migrant domestic worker and survivor
Egna Legna Besidet and LAU’s research found that the large majority of survivors interviewed — 75 percent — were undocumented or not in possession of their documents at the time when they were sexually harassed, making them less likely to turn to the authorities or report the abuse they endured.
“If we do speak up, they don’t listen,” Ayana tells The Public Source. “Instead the first thing we’re asked is: ‘Where are your papers?’ I would be in the right, but when this is asked I am suddenly in the wrong.”
What’s more, much of the time these women’s home countries, represented by embassies, honorary consulates, or other proxies, do not fight for them when they turn to them for help. “The women send remittances to their home country, so from an economic perspective, it’s profitable for [their countries of origin]” to keep working abroad, even in abusive environments, Kitoko says.
The study found that less than 25 percent of the survivors interviewed felt safe or comfortable enough to report the abuse they endured, or take any kind of action against the abuser.
At first, Ayana, too, was hesitant to speak openly about her experience, out of fear that people would look down on her and spread rumors. “This is a society that does not stand with you; people flip things around for their benefit,” she says. “People will call us liars. No one believes us.”
Although many Lebanese are disillusioned with justice through legal channels, victim-blaming is a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to sexual violence.
When Ayana told her neighbors about what her ex-property manager was doing, they seemed to already know of his ways, and blamed previous tenants for “making him this way” by choosing to stay silent, absolving him of accountability for his actions.
Egna Legna Besidet and LAU’s research found that the large majority of survivors interviewed — 75 percent — were undocumented or not in possession of their documents at the time when they were sexually harassed, making them less likely to turn to the authorities or report the abuse they endured.
The study found that most survivors choose to escape the situations they were in instead of reporting their experience or taking legal action, citing fear of the abusers and their families, fear of potential retaliation, lack of knowledge of where to turn for help, lack of confidence in the system, and feelings of shame.
When migrant domestic workers did take steps toward legal action, the study found, their cases went nowhere, with law enforcement merely “[advising them] to be cautious” in 65 percent of these cases. Others said friends, neighbors, and police brushed off or disbelieved their testimonies, and told them to flee if they could.
“If you try to complain, they blame you and they send you back home,” Helene tells The Public Source. “Silence is what is required to survive.”
Flawed Legislation
In theory, Law No. 205/2020 was meant to streamline people’s ability to report sexual harassment and make justice achievable. Instead, migrant domestic workers — already marginalized and disadvantaged — are discouraged from coming forward and reporting harassment through formal channels because of the process’ nature as hostile , impersonal, and heavily bureaucratized.
As it stands, the law is not accompanied by anti-harassment policies and corresponding reporting mechanisms in the workplace to protect survivors and witnesses.
Law No. 205/2020’s status as a criminal law means that if a survivor manages to escape their abusive environment and is taken seriously by police forces when filing a report, they may have to go through the whole criminal justice process — an investigation, a judge, potential jail time, and a criminal court. Due to their public nature, these can be daunting procedures for all survivors, let alone already vulnerable migrant women at the margins of Lebanese society.
More often than not, this becomes a torturous, costly, and time-consuming process where a verdict may not be reached, or is highly dependent on the whims and prejudices of the judge taking the case.
Migrant domestic workers are not explicitly mentioned in Law No. 293/2014 because they are technically not related to the family with whom they live. Simultaneously, migrant domestic workers are also excluded from the Labor Law, which was traditionally justified by the fact that they are considered “part of the family.”
In most of the world, Nammour explains, anti-harassment legislation is written to recognize the impact of top-down power dynamics in workplace harassment cases.
“Law No. 205/2020 says sexual harassment is punishable if the harasser has power or authority over the victim; the sponsor has power and authority — she [the migrant worker] is living under his roof,” Kitoko notes.
In fact, Law No. 205/2020 states that, if the harasser is in a position of dominance or authority over the survivor — which employers, if they are the harassers, are — they will be met with a heftier punishment and a penalty increase, even if the incident of harassment is not recurrent.
But “in case an employee files a lawsuit against an employer, here the employer has a chance to counter-file a lawsuit and use it so that the employee retracts their lawsuit against them,” Nammour explains.
In cases where the sponsor is the harasser, there are no explicit tools or mechanisms for holding them accountable.
Communication officer at migrant rights NGO Anti-Racism Movement (ARM) Kareem Nofal says the law does not account for cases where the employers are also the harassers. They should be responsible for compensating the worker for the psychological and physical damages they caused, he says, but it doesn’t require them to do so. And in cases where the migrant worker lives in her place of employment, the law does not protect her working or living conditions either.
“The law should at least create a channel for reporting where undocumented victims can feel safe doing so, without being afraid of ending up in prison, deported, or in detention centers,” Kitoko said, frustrated.
Another major issue with legislation around sexual harassment is the burden of proof — the requirement of evidence.
Nammour explains that one of the main reasons survivors are unable to achieve justice through this law is because it places the perpetrator on equal footing with the survivor. If the survivor cannot put together physical evidence of a reported act of sexual violence — which is forensically already difficult, and requires material resources that impoverished, captive migrant domestic workers most probably don’t have access to — the situation then becomes a case of the perpetrator’s testimony against the survivor’s.
For migrant domestic workers who face harassment, in many cases the workplace also happens to be the domestic sphere — a home. However, they find themselves excluded from Law No. 293/2014, which criminalizes domestic violence.
“We are everywhere — in people’s homes, in the mouths of human rights organizations, etc. — but we’re invisible.” —Ayana, migrant domestic worker and survivor
Ghida Frangieh, a lawyer with Legal Agenda, tells The Public Source that migrant domestic workers are not explicitly mentioned in Law No. 293/2014 because they are technically not related to the family with whom they live. Simultaneously, migrant domestic workers are also excluded from the Labor Law, which was traditionally justified by the fact that they are considered “part of the family.” This legal Catch-22 exempts homes and domestic workplaces in general from being subjected to monitoring for labor violations, while denying domestic workers the guarantees of the Labor Law, Frangieh says.
The status of migrant domestic workers, then, varies so as to exonerate their employers from responsibility under either legal framework.
Legal Agenda has documented at least one case where a migrant domestic worker was protected from domestic violence under Law No. 293/2014, but such cases are exceedingly rare.
Avenues for Change
While advocates fight for more targeted legislation, other avenues could make a practical difference to the lives of migrant domestic workers facing sexual violence.
The Egna Legna Besidet-LAU study calls for the establishment of government-funded and -run shelters specifically for migrant survivors of sexualized violence. Survivors need trustworthy legal counsel, psychosocial support (including counseling), and healthcare services in order to address both physical and psychological trauma, the report says.
But such changes, Nofal says, merely treat the symptoms rather than the root issues — Kafala and patriarchy, which enable each other.
He argues that Law No. 205/2020 needs to be amended to give survivors the option of going through the civil justice system instead of criminal courts.
The Triangle report meanwhile calls on the Labor Ministry to start regular inspections of homes where migrant domestic workers are employed — which is not practical and unlikely to happen due to the ministry’s limited budget and capacity. The Egna Legna Besidet-LAU report also calls on the Labor Ministry to reevaluate the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) draft decree on the monitoring and regulation of private recruitment agencies in Lebanon.
But ARM Advocacy and Communications Manager Salma Sakr tells The Public Source that reform is not enough, as the Kafala system, at its core, is based on a multifaceted power imbalance between sponsor and sponsored, enabling harm — proxy slavery — to occur.
“The state needs to take this responsibility, which has been left to the private sector for so long, allowing it to become this huge, money-making, human trafficking network,” Sakr says. “There needs to be a serious political shift in the state’s responsibility towards migrants.”
ARM is currently supporting campaigns for the abolition of Kafala and the creation of alternative models — where recruitment agencies are no longer part of the process.
One alternative supported by the organization is for migrant domestic workers to become freelance workers who are not tied to a specific recruitment agency, sponsor, or household, but are free to work independently.
“It gives the agency and power dynamic back to the migrant domestic worker, who is more or less in charge of their work,” Nofal says.
“We do all of this [campaign] work for a day that comes just once a year. International Women’s Day is once a year. We create all of this momentum and these mobilizations in the weeks just before and after it. And then what? We aren’t abused just once a year — this is happening constantly and continuously. This should be talked about always, every day.” —Ayana, migrant domestic worker and survivor
Ayana says she does not feel like she can obtain justice or closure in any form so long as the Kafala system stands strong.
“Kafala is always the main obstacle,” she tells The Public Source.
This is at the heart of the struggle: abolishing Kafala by amending the Labor Code to include migrant domestic workers under Article 7, which currently explicitly excludes them from the Labor Code, and would guarantee them the right to “just and favorable working conditions” under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) that Lebanon ratified in 1972. This includes “freedom from harassment, including sexual harassment” as per General Comment No. 23 on Article 7 of the ICESCR.
The Egna Legna Besidet-LAU report explicitly calls for this amendment, in order to include “legal provisions in line with the ILO’s Convention 189 on Domestic Workers and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 3, 5, 8, 10, 16.”
The migrant domestic workers interviewed also express the importance of consistent, strategic campaigning to spread awareness, so that social reforms may eventually come to pass.
Women’s rights movements in Lebanon should also make more conscious efforts to include migrants, Helene says. “Rights are rights.”
“We do all of this [campaign] work for a day that comes just once a year. International Women’s Day is once a year. We create all of this momentum and these mobilizations in the weeks just before and after it. And then what?” Ayana notes. “We aren’t abused just once a year — this is happening constantly and continuously. This should be talked about always, every day.”
As a communication officer, Nofal has also noticed the value of language in changing discourses and opinions. “Media and communication language often situate survivors of gender-based violence as victims to be addressed with pity, rather than survivors whom the system failed to protect in the first place,” he tells The Public Source. “I personally think that our attitudes should stray away from victimization and more toward addressing immediate psychological and physical needs.”
Despite the difficulties, Helene, who now volunteers at Egna Legna Besidet, feels like there has been a turnaround over the past two or so years; she feels empowered seeing how more and more NGOs are uplifting migrant voices.
“Things are not like they were a few years ago,” Helene tells The Public Source. “Before, there was no hope at all.”
Ayana insists that furthering public discussion of the issue is necessary.
“Conversations will change the world,” she says. “Everyone should be talking about this, even migrant domestic workers: if you speak up, someone else will feel empowered to do so too.”