‘Need to verify mental health before recruiting housemaids’
to Al-Seyassah daily, a “housemaid was arrested for kidnapping her sponsor’s child and torturing him.” When the Operations Room of Ministry of Interior received information from a Kuwaiti woman about a woman slapping a child and dragging him down the street in Fahad Al-Ahmad area, security men rushed to the location and arrested the woman. When the child’s father was summoned to the police station, he revealed that the woman, who works as a housemaid in his house, kidnapped his son without the knowledge of the mother” (See Arab Times May 1 2015). Even though we should always expose the plights of some abused housemaids, however, we also need to recognize the fact that there are currently in Kuwait a few number of mentally disturbed, troublemaking, provocative and dangerous housemaids! It is the children of the sponsor in particular who fall victim to some vicious, unmerciful and vindictive housemaids!
The Ministry of Interior needs to start requiring from recruiting agencies or potential sponsors an authentic psychological evaluation for a new housemaid. Otherwise, we will continue to hear about abuse cases against sponsors and their children. In fact, the best way to overcome this difficulty of verifying whether those persons who are given the responsibility to take care of children are actually sane requires constant monitoring and evaluation of their mental conditions. Moreover, we also need to recognize the biases some local medias show toward housemaid abuse, emphasizing their victimization, while at the same time becoming sometimes silent when a house-helper abuses the expat or Kuwaiti sponsors’ children. Why not put new restrictions on recruiting maids from certain countries, especially whose nationals have already committed horrendous crimes against expat or Kuwaiti sponsors or their family members. I would even stop issuing visas for housemaids before we establish an effective monitoring system for recruitment agencies; request from foreign embassies to provide an accurate record of their nationals. Furthermore, why not require every Kuwaiti or expat sponsor to put security cameras in their houses and apartments in order to protect the lives of their children against housemaid abuse?
Incidents of housemaids abusing children may not reach the level of an epidemic. Nevertheless, this abuse can take different forms: lack of responsible behavior on the part of the domestic worker, showing a clear lack of commitment to their workplace, some housemaids exploiting their sponsor and using them as dispensable tools, mere vehicles to transfer residency or to look for a “better” paying-job. International human rights organizations tend to focus only on the other side of the ugly story of exploitation and abuse, I have not seen so far any human rights organization exposing some housemaids’ abuse against sponsors or their children.
It is also logical to expect that some housemaids do actually suffer from some type of serious mental illness; therefore becoming a real threat to children and sponsors.
We will save ourselves the troubles of dealing with some wacko housemaids if we put in place certain precautionary procedures, which will stop those who are not qualified from working in Kuwait.