Employers routinely confiscate domestic workers' passports and confine them to the workplace, the rights group says.
The UAE has denied the charges, saying Human Rights Watch has ignored its efforts to improve workers' conditions.
%u2026 15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution%u2026 Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka%u2019s Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers
were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year%u2026After three months, I asked Madam for my salary and she started to beat me with iron bars and wooden sticks," the maid explains of her time in Saudi Arabia.
"Sometimes she would take a hot iron and burn me or heat up a knife and put it on my body."
Kusuma is still trying to understand why her employer treated her this way when she had not done anything wrong.
Kusuma says that one day her employer just tired of her. The employer said they were going to the police station and that Kusuma would be arrested.
