[Reader-list] Saving Mostakina

[Shivam Vij]

  Saving Mostakina

  By Shamim Ahsan and Kajalie Shehreen Islam in Dhaka
  Daily Star (Bangladesh) / 2 May 2004
 
http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2004/05/02/coverstory.htm


Down the long corridors of Dhaka Medical College
Hospital (DMCH) at the One-Stop Crisis Centre sits a
little girl with a plastic doll in her hand. In her
orange and red floral printed dress and two little
ponytails at the top of her head, she could be
anyone's child. Except for the claw marks all over her
young cheeks, the nasty gash at the corner of one eye,
the severe burns down both her arms. Who would
tolerate such abuse silently in this day and age? What
kind of a person would inflict such torture on anyone,
let alone a child? 

Mostakina is the ten-year-old domestic "servant" girl
everyone saw on the news last week, with blood oozing
out of the side of her face. Rescued from the house of
her employers, Dr. ABM Jamal and Dr. Fatema Doza,
Mostakina had been suffering such cruelty for the past
one year.

"I never told anyone," says Mostakina, when asked
whether she had gone to anyone for help. "I was afraid
she would beat me even more."

As any child would, Mostakina sometimes broke a few
things or thread would come out of a piece of clothing
she had washed. Considering the age of the girl, and
the fact that she did practically all the housework
except cooking -- from cleaning the floors to washing
and ironing clothes -- it really wasn't much. But
Fatema Doza, a doctor at DMCH, beat Mostakina for the
most minor mistakes. She would claw at her face and
hit her with anything, from sticks and brooms to bread
rollers. The "Bua" would also be hit and slapped and
made to drink dirty water when the dishes weren't
washed clean enough. Mostakina was made to drink
Doza's children's urine. "She would even spit on my
rice," she says.

Mostakina was not paid any monthly salary, usually on
the pretext of it being extracted against the price of
the things she had broken or ruined. She would also
not be given anything to eat the day she broke
anything. Even when she was, it was a bit of one piece
of fish split many ways.

Two months ago, after Doza put a heated electric iron
to Mostakina's arm, the girl tried to run away. But
before she could get very far, the darwan caught her
and brought her back. Last week, when some thread came
out of another apparel, Doza hit Mostakina on the face
with a bread roller and burnt her other arm with the
iron. It was only when the injured girl went to put
out the garbage that a conscientious neighbour saw her
condition and called the police.

"I want her to be punished," says the little girl. "I
don't want Phupa (Dr. ABM Jamal) to be punished. He
never hit me. He asked Phupi not to hit me. But she
wouldn't listen. She would beat me when he was at the
hospital. If he protested when he got home, she would
beat him too with a broom.”

"The last time she did this," says Mostakina, "he told
her not to hit another person's child. If I died, how
would they face the consequences, who would pay for
the court case, he asked her. She said it would be
good if I really did die.”

Sub-Inspector Baqui was loitering in Katabon
intersection when he received a call from the police
headquarters at around 12.30 pm. He was instructed to
go to an apartment building at 2/10 Paribagh behind PG
hospital where a minor girl with serious injuries was
to be found. In 15 minutes Baqui was at the apartment
building gate and the darwan led him to the particular
flat. But he couldn't enter the house as it was
locked. Upon instruction the girl readily came to the
verandah and talked to Baqui who stood on the street.
Baqui was confirmed about the incident. He then
decided to wait in the second floor in the landlord's
apartment as he was told that Dr. Jamal, who went to
bring his son back from school, would return soon. At
around 1.20 pm Jamal came back home and when asked
about the beating up of their housemaid, he simply
denied that any such incident had taken place. Baqui
then told that he had already talked to the girl and
Jamal didn't have any option but to allow him in. "I
was shocked when the girl was brought before me the
scar with a diametre of about one and a half inches,
just a couple of inches beneath her left eye was still
fresh, with a blackish shadow all around it", says
Baqui. "There were also burn injuries, perhaps one or
two days old, long and straight on both her forearms.
When I asked her she related how she was burnt with a
heated iron, her voice choking with suppressed tears.
I found marks of beating on almost all over her body;
The woman seemed to have beaten her with virtually
everything she could lay her hands on. I have never
seen such inhuman torture on such a small child in the
six years of service," Baqui narrates. 

Around 2.40pm the housewife returned home upon her
husband's phone call. "She first denied of ever
putting the iron on her face, and started to scold the
girl right before me asking her why she lied to me.
Upon my insistence she later conceded that she
sometimes gave her 'mild beatings', but that was due
to Mostakina's intolerable naughtiness or when she
committed some 'grave sins' like breaking a tea-cup or
for not sweeping up the floors as good as the woman
wanted. Her husband also corroborated her accusations
saying that Mostakina was by nature a little naughty
but he admitted that it wasn't right for his wife to
treat her that way. He then tried to condone his
wife's behaviour saying that she sometimes couldn't
keep her cool and did these things in the heat of the
moment," Baqui. The couple was arrested and brought to
Ramna thana and Baqui lodged a case under the Special
Act for Prevention of Women and Children Repression
2000, as the plaintiff.

Mostakina is, in a sense, lucky. Unlike many others
who have been subjected to similar kind of brutality
and will continue to suffer indefinitely Mostakina has
at least been rescued from her tormentors. But the big
question now is will her tormentors be brought to
justice? If past records are any indication there is
almost no chance to see the perpetrators get punished.

In March of this year, Shirin, a 14-year-old domestic
worker in Rajshahi was raped and killed. Though her
employers said she committed suicide and hung herself,
police suspected they had something to do with the
murder and arrested them. Shirin's mother said she did
not want any trouble and that the money she could get
was all that mattered. But the next day, Shirin's
employer Sharmin Sultana Dipa, who often used to beat
her, confessed strangling Dipa to death and hanging
her. It is still not known who raped the teenager.

Hasna Hena worked for a woman in Mirpur. Another maid
at the house would do things wrong and blame Hasna for
it. When one day she put too many tea leaves in a cup
of tea Hasna had made for her mistress, the woman
tossed away the cup, beat Hasna and threw her out of
the house. Hasna's uncle later took her to the police
and the hospital. After two months at the hospital,
Hasna joined a shelter home, Proshanti.

Banu is another domestic worker who joined the shelter
home after spending a month in the hospital after
being beaten by her employer. The list -- of only
those who have actually filed cases -- goes on.

Bangladesh National Women's Lawyers Association,
better known as BNWLA, a human rights organisation
that provides legal aid, is handling Mostakina's case
and has the experience of conducting more than two
hundred such cases of repression on domestic workers
over the last two decades. But it has succeeded in
getting the offender/s punished in only seven or eight
cases. The data provided by Mominul Islam Shuruz,
Senior Investigation Officer of BNWLA, lists various
reasons for such a piteous record.

A large number of cases fizzle out even before they
are taken up in the court while many more end midway
after good initial progress. Money does the trick in
most cases. The only thing an offender has to do is
get hold of the parents or guardians of the victim and
offer a few thousand taka, and everything is settled.
For a father who is forced to send his nine or
10-year-old daughter away from home so that she can
earn her own food, money matters a lot. "10,000 taka
for some bruises here and there appears too tempting
an offer to reject," says Shuruz. Besides, he adds,
for a poor, illiterate villager, police and court are
jhamela (trouble), and compromise in exchange of
monetary compensation seems a logical and even
profitable option. Shuruz then relates an incident
involving a brutal killing of a 14 year-old domestic
help who was slaughtered by a kitchen knife by the
housewife. After one or two hearings the victim's
father stopped co-operating with us. We kept watch on
him and one day we found him having lunch in the very
house where his daughter worked and got brutally
killed. When I asked him why he gave up the fight he
seemed to have his answer ready: 'Shaheb has given me
40 thousand taka. Besides, what is the use of going to
court? I am not going to get my daughter back.'"

What many might find impossible to imagine is that
simple to some.

And once there is a settlement between offenders and
the victim's family, the third party, that is BNWLA,
which is providing legal aid, has to simply wash its
hands of the case. "If we still persist, which we can
technically do, we might find ourselves in more
trouble. There have been cases where we were made to
look as if we had ulterior motive or some profit to
make out of the case in the guise of helping the
victims," Shuruz explains.

Police, as everywhere, play their dirty tricks here as
well. Since they are directly involved in all the
different stages of a case, from submitting the FIR
(First Information Report) to submission of the charge
sheet and it is they who conduct the entire
investigation, they can influence the fate of a
particular case to a great extent. "Police often
intentionally leave big gaps while framing charges so
that they can allow criminals to get off the hook in
exchange of money. On the other hand the accused party
-- in this case the doctor couple -- has a lot to
offer. And if money fails to deliver they will wield
their social, and if need be, even political
influence. That they will escape punishment is almost
a certainty," Shuruz cannot help being pessimistic.

An interesting pattern can be detected in the
incidents of violence against domestic help. Once the
initial shock subsides, a conscious or unconscious
urge to paint the 'brutal offence' as a 'mistake'
begins to gain strength. The police who have rescued
the victim, the doctors who have treated the serious
wounds, the lawyer who is contesting on the victim's
behalf and finally even the judge who is deciding the
case, start to believe in the 'mistake theory' with
growing conviction each day. But why does it happen
this way?

No doubt, poverty of the victim and corruption of the
law-enforcing agency are often responsible for justice
being denied, but there is another underlying force,
far stronger and more complex in nature, at play.
Abusing domestic help is not just another form of
violence. It ensues from a very acute sense of
class-awareness that is deeply buried in the
collective consciousness of the so-called
half-educated, middle-class bhodrolok. Once the vision
gets blurred, he cannot see a person as a human being,
but tends to differentiate between human beings using
artificial criteria. Many of us, members of the
so-called middle class, are thus quite biased and
prejudicial in our judgement when considerating
something we consider below our status -- domestic
workers are easily relegated to lesser human beings
who don't deserve equal treatment. 

Even after seeing the 10-year-old bearing such
ferocious, raw marks of brutality comments like "you
see, domestic workers are such a trouble", "whatever
you say maidservants are also no dervishes",
"sometimes, you just cannot bear with them", "they are
all ungrateful thieves" are common. "I have even heard
judges talking about how roguish these domestic
workers really are," says Shuruz. No law, no honest
police officer can solve it unless we rectify our
corrupt, partial perspective.

Mostakina's future is uncertain. Her mother passed
away before she can remember. She was brought up by a
neighbour. Her father later remarried and someone from
her village brought her to the doctor couple. Her
father hasn't visited her in the past year. After her
treatment is completed, she will go into BNWLA's
shelter home, Proshanti. Beyond that, as is the case
with many other girls there, no one really knows.

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