Hong Kong. As she walks through Hong Kong’s Victoria Park on a busy Sunday afternoon, Erwiana Sulistyaningsih is stopped every few steps for photos and hugs.

Most of her fans are Indonesian domestic workers enjoying their weekly day off, gathering as they always do for food, dancing and a chat, but there are Hong Kong families too.

This is the former maid’s final day in Hong Kong after winning her case against the abusive employer who beat, starved and kept her prisoner.

On Friday, Law Wan-tung, 44, was sentenced to six years in prison on 18 charges including grievous bodily harm, assault, criminal intimidation and failure to pay wages in a case that made headlines around the world.

It has turned the 24-year-old Indonesian into a hero for many of her peers, and though her case shone a spotlight on the abuse often suffered behind closed doors, she isn’t finished yet.

“I still want to help my fellow migrant workers who are abused and neglected by my own government,” she told AFP. “If there’s an opportunity, I would like to create a foundation to help with these issues and to educate the Indonesian community so that they can understand our basic problems outside the country and back in Indonesia.”

Softly-spoken and slight, with newly bobbed hair and huddled in a quilted orange jacket, she is sceptical that Indonesia will take meaningful action to protect migrant workers, arguing that the problem is so multi-layered and deep-rooted there is no quick fix.

Systemic problem

From a poor farming family in East Java, Sulistyaningsih’s parents could not afford to send her or her brother to university. After graduating from high school she worked as a waitress but was determined to save up for college and to help support her family financially, so moved to Hong Kong to join its army of domestic workers in 2013.

The city is home to nearly 300,000 maids, mainly from Indonesia and the Philippines.

Sulistyaningsih says her story highlights Indonesia’s endemic problems — a lack of job opportunities and an unaffordable further education system.

“The government should provide accessible education especially for poor people,” she says, as well as helping to create “decent jobs for decent pay, not just profit for investors.”

That way, fewer people would feel they had to seek their fortune overseas, she says.

When they arrive in Hong Kong, the women known locally as “helpers” are often stung by massive agency fees back home, which leave them in debt — something which local campaigners, Amnesty International and the judge in Sulistyaningsih’s case highlighted as a major problem.

Sulistyaningsih herself says both her passport and a booklet explaining her rights were removed by her employment agency when she first set foot in the city.

“I was afraid because I had heard so much about migrant workers dying abroad, but I took the challenge hoping my fate would be better.”

“Now I realize it’s not just fate — it’s the system that makes us vulnerable.”

Hong Kong-based campaign group Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Body is planning to file an official complaint to the legislature about domestic workers’ conditions, with the aim of forcing a reform debate in the city’s de facto parliament.

Lasting scars

Sulistyaningsih says she is looking forward to resuming her studies in economics at the Catholic Private University in Central Java, where she was offered a four-year scholarship after the establishment’s owner read about her case.

While it is a new chapter after a three-month break for the trial, the impact of the abuse she suffered still clearly hangs over her.

“I hate the sound of loud voices,” she said. “I still feel the trauma.”

Her teeth remain chipped, her nose damaged and her feet scarred after the attacks by Law, and she still has regular counseling.

Both her mother, who had been a domestic worker in Brunei, and her father had been worried about her choice to leave, she says.

“My parents cried when they found out what had happened to me. But they are proud of me … at least I’m brave enough to speak out.”

Sulistyaningsih’s life will never be the same — and while she smiles for the cameras in Victoria Park, there is a fierce determination to make her experience count for something.

“I feel very happy and relieved [after the verdict and sentencing] but in the back of my mind I think: ‘If migrant workers are still being treated the same, what’s it all for?’”

“I will continue to fight with the government if they do not want to protect their workers.”

Agence France-Presse

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Source: The Jakarta Globe