Tortured abroad, now she fears stigma at home
In yet another instance of female Bangladeshi expatriate workers enduring torture in a Middle East country, a 32-year-old woman returned home from Saudi Arabia with her six-month-old son.
She landed at the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in the capital on Tuesday.
In keeping with the editorial policy, The Daily Star is not publishing her name or photograph.
The woman alleged that she had been abused and tortured by the owner of the house where she worked in Saudi Arabia. The owner is also the father of her child, she said.
Worried about how to return home with her child as she might fall victim to social stigma, the woman has taken shelter at the BRAC Learning Center in the capital's Ashkona, said Shariful Hasan, head of BRAC's migration programme.
Sources at HSIA said the woman's ancestral home is in Brahmanbaria.
She left the country for Saudi Arabia in November 2019. She was frequently tortured since starting work in the Gulf country. When she was pregnant, she was sent to jail and gave birth to her baby boy there.
"No one in my family knows about it. I can't go back to my family with my child," an official of BRAC's migration programme quoted the woman as saying.
With nowhere to go after landing at the Dhaka airport, the woman informed the Airport Armed Police Battalion about her helpless state.
She was later handed over to the BRAC Migration Program.
"Such incidents are very unfortunate. This is another example of the extreme persecution of our expatriate women workers in Saudi Arabia," Shariful Hassan told The Daily Star.
He said there should be a proper investigation into these incidents and that the household which employed her in Saudi Arabia should be investigated. If necessary, DNA tests should be done to find out the paternity of the child.
Shariful said their primary challenge now is to keep the baby healthy and support the woman mentally. "We will then try to get her to her village home."
Shariful said they have seen 12 such incidents before. "We tried to stand by their side, but we need to raise our voices and policymakers should play a responsible role to prevent such incidents in future."
According to BRAC's migration programme, another female expatriate worker returned to Dhaka from Saudi Arabia on April 2 and left her eight-month-old baby at the Dhaka airport.
On March 26, a woman from Narsingdi's Belabo upazila returned home from Saudi Arabia on March 26 with a son after having lost her psychological balance.
She had given birth in that state in a jail in Makkah, Saudi Arabia.
On February 24, another female domestic worker was forced to return from Oman with a four-month-old daughter.
Upon arrival at the airport, she told the APBn that the father of her child was an Omani citizen. Torturing and abusing her, he handed her over to Oman police after she became pregnant. The mother gave birth while in the Oman deportation camp.
On December 16 last year, another female migrant worker was forced to return home from Oman with her three-month-old child.
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