Eradicating scourge of domestic slavery in Brazil is an uphill battle
• Most victims never realise they are being abused, says prosecutor
Whenever Elisa goes out in her small town in northeastern Brazil, she fears seeing the family she once considered her own.
After almost three decades of domestic work with no pay and little freedom, Elisa realised she was being exploited as a slave and plotted to escape the household where she had lived since the age of seven.
The 38-year-old woman was rescued in 2018 after alerting the authorities and has started to build a new life.
But a reminder of her captivity, fear and exploitation is never too far away.
“Every now and then I see the family,” she said by phone from her home in Ipira town in Bahia state.
The family told officials they took Elisa in as a child after she was abandoned by her parents when they separated.
“It is kind of a horrible, difficult feeling,” said Elisa, who did not give her real name for fear of reprisals. “There’ sa sense of fear, even though they can’t do anything to me.”
Elisa’s rescue was a rare victory for labour officials, who said that domestic servitude in Brazil was difficult to spot and stop because victims rarely regard themselves as modernday slaves.
While labour inspectors could visit workplaces at will to check for slavery, they had to get permission from a judge to enter a home, and evidence of abuse from victims was a prerequisite.
Of 3,513 workers officials found in slavery-like conditions from 2017 to 2019, only 21 were in domestic servitude.
“It is very rare to receive complaints [about domestic servitude] ... as most [victims] never realise they are being abused,” said labour prosecutor Ana Lucia Stumpf Gonzalez.
And advocates fear the coronavirus pandemic will see more domestic workers trapped with abusive employers indefinitely yet unlikely to speak out or seek help for fear of losing their jobs.
Even when victims were rescued and their captors prosecuted or fined, officials said relatively low compensation payments for domestic servitude and the rarity of jail terms for modern slavery meant exploitive bosses were unlikely to be deterred.
Yet domestic servitude hit the headlines in Brazil in June when authorities found a 61year-old domestic worker who they judged to have been kept as a slave in a mansion in Sao Paulo for years.
The case shocked the public. The woman was found living in a shed, and her boss worked for Avon. The beauty company fired the executive, and said it would provide financial aid to the victim.
The former Avon employee, who was charged with her husband and mother with enslaving a worker, has denied the charges.
Prosecutors are seeking about $190,000 in damages.
While there is no data on domestic servitude, government figures from 2014 show that about 174,000 children were employed as domestic workers.
By law, domestic workers must be at least 18 years old. Many families in Brazil employ at least one domestic worker. In some cases, they take in abandoned children to raise as their own, but subject them to domestic servitude, according to advocates. Labour prosecutor Luciana Coutinho said that the abuse of young domestic workers was underreported, and that it belonged to a “hardcore”
class of child labour — along with sexual exploitation and drug trafficking — that was considered particularly tough to prevent.
Cases came to light only when there was a complaint or a tragedy, “when the child suffers sexual abuse, is beaten or killed, which has unfortunately happened before ” , Coutinho said.
If victims are not identified and rescued at a young age, they might never be discovered as adults, said labour inspectors.
“The longer the victim remains in the home environment with deprivation of ... rights, the more difficult it is to [carry out a] rescue,” said Mauricio Krepsky, head of the division of inspection for the eradication of slave labour.
In 2017, authorities received a tip-off about a domestic worker who was being kept as a slave in Rubim, a town in Minas Gerais state.
The woman, then aged 68, had not been paid for years, and her boss was taking her dead husband’s pension. Yet she struggled to accept that she had been enslaved even after her rescue, according to labour prosecutor Juliane Mombelli, who participated in the rescue.
“She thought that she was being protected by the employer, because she was alone in the world — a widow,” said Mombelli.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the federation of unions for domestic workers (Fenatrad) said some employers had forced their domestic workers to stay and threatened to fire them if they went home.
“The employer wants them to stay at work. It’s abuse. In order not to be unemployed, they submit,” said Luiza Batista, president of Fenatrad.
Authorities and activists say securing compensation is key to helping victims who in many cases have only ever known a life of domestic servitude, and have no education, family or friends.
Yet labour prosecutors said they were limited by the financial means of the abusers when seeking damages for victims. In 2017, an employer in Elisio Medrado in Bahia state who exploited his domestic worker from the age of 12 to 52 was ordered to pay her severance worth $14,818.
However, he did not show up at the hearing to finalise the payment, leaving the victim empty-handed, according to a labour inspector’s report reviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In Elisa’s case, she was pleased to get about $18,452 in damages, severance and back pay from her bosses, though labour prosecutors said she would have received a much larger sum had she been exploited by wealthy employers or a company.
The money has enabled Elisa to buy her own house — a far cry from when all of her possessions could fit into two desk drawers. She still cleans houses for a living, but on her own terms and takes home about $6.54 a day — in line with the minimum wage.
“It’s a lot of work for little money, but enough to pay for electricity, water and food,” she said. “You live one day at a time. One thing I’d like to do is study, to get a better job.”